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{
    "pk": 28928,
    "title": "Detecting presupposition failure and accommodation with EEG",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Sentence comprehension in part involves introducing, stor-ing, and retrieving information about individuals. Natural lan-guages provide various means for performing this computa-tional work. One popular idea is that indefinite noun phrasesprovide instructions for updating the discourse model byadding a new discourse referent, while definite noun phrasespresuppose the existence of a discourse referent available inmemory, as well as instructions for retrieving it. When no an-tecedent is available, the definite’s presupposition fails to besatisfied, resulting in the so-called ‘presupposition failure’ andpragmatic infelicity. However, under certain conditions, def-inite noun phrases can felicitously be used even when no an-tecedent is available in memory. In such cases, a conversa-tional repair strategy called ‘presupposition accommodation’can rescue the discourse by adding the required referent. Itis natural to expect greater processing costs for adding a dis-course referent with a definite than with an indefinite: althoughboth involve the process of adding a referent, definites gothrough a stage of presupposition failure and a subsequent de-cision to accommodate. The experimental challenge has beento apply a method sensitive enough to detect expected costsin discourse, even when the participant is unaware of the pre-supposition failure and repairs it rapidly. The present studyaddresses this challenge by using EEG to capture temporallyfine-grained processing differences between definite and indef-inite noun phrases when both introduce new discourse refer-ents in plausible and implausible contexts. Our main findingis that definite noun phrases elicit the Left Anterior Negativ-ity (LAN) effect, compared to indefinite noun phrases, bothin implausible contexts where there is a sense of oddness andin perfectly coherent contexts. We take this as evidence of aspecific cognitive stage at which presupposition failure is de-tected and when an accommodation decision occurs. This alsosupports the idea that, when encountering a definite, the LANis tightly linked to working memory processes involving thesearch for discourse elements that are presupposed to exist inmemory. When none are found, definites are subsequently ac-commodated and bridged to other entities in the discourse.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "discourse; presuppositions; context; accommoda-tion; EEG"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Papers with Poster Presentations",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8nn868zm",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Alice",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Xia",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Carleton University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Roxana",
            "middle_name": "M.",
            "last_name": "Barbu",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Carleton University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Kathleen",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Van Benthem",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Carleton University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Daniel",
            "middle_name": "A.",
            "last_name": "Di Giovanni",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Rue Universite Montreal",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Ida",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Toivonen",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Carleton University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Raj",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Singh",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Carleton University",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2019-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28928/galley/18799/download/"
        }
    ]
}