The Cognitive Processes Underlying Counterfactual Comprehension/Production And The Individual Differences

Counterfactuals describe imagined alternatives to reality that people know to be false.People understand a counterfactual statement(e.g.,If I had studied harder,I would have passed the exam.)by keeping two possibilities in mind: the conjecture(e.g.,I studied hard and I passed the exam.)and the presupposed fact(e.g.,I did not study hard and I failed the exam.).Counterfactual processing thus requires people to represent false information that is temporarily supposed to be true,and keep track of the epistemic status of both the suppositional model and factual model.Counterfactual thinking is an essential ingredient of our everyday cognition,yet it is only very recently that researchers have begun to empirically test how counterfactual meaning is accessed and represented during language processing.Based on previous literature,several significant questions stand out and require to be further addressed:The first pertains to language comprehension accounts for counterfactual information processing.It remains inconclusive whether readers activate and maintain dual representation(i.e.,the explicit suppositional representation and the implied factual representation;Mental Space and Mental Model Theory)in real-time counterfactual processing,or they construct only one mental model based on preceding discourse context,with no interference from the alternative representation(i.e.,“singularity principle”,Suppositional Theory).Second,previous studies on counterfactual processing mainly focus on Indo-European languages that have systematic counterfactual markers,it is unclear how counterfactuals are processed in languages like Chinese that lack dedicated linguistic devices for marking counterfactuality and mainly depend on contextual and pragmatic cues.It remains unexplored whether the cognitive processes underlying Chinese counterfactuals differ from that of Indo-European languages.Exploration of this question will provide important implications for the critical question of language relativity(i.e.,the relation between language and thought).Lastly,individual differences in counterfactual processing have been largely neglected in previous studies.The ability to consider a fictional version of the world,as well as the ability to go beyond the literal information and infer the implied meaning,varies from person to person.This implies an important link between counterfactual processing and individuals' cognitive capacities.Studies in this respect may help reveal which aspects of cognitive resources are called on during counterfactual language processing,and how people of different cognitive styles show distinct processing patterns.To tackle these issues,the goal of this dissertation was to investigate the cognitive processes underlying Chinese counterfactual comprehension and production,with an emphasis on the individual differences in counterfactual processing.The present study focuses on the following three questions:1)What is the cognitive process underlying Chinese counterfactual comprehension(i.e.,dual representation or single representation)? Specifically,how do readers access and coordinate the literal suppositional representation and implied factual representation in real-time language processing,and what are the factors that influence this process?2)What are the characteristics/regularities of Chinese counterfactual production?To be more specific,I mainly focused on the two stages of counterfactual production:activation(i.e.,what are the situational factors that trigger counterfactual thinking)and functional content(i.e.,what do the counterfactual thoughts focus on).3)Whether and how do individual differences play a role in modulating counterfactual comprehension/production? What are the individual factors(e.g.,Theory of Mind,pragmatic skills,working memory,L2 proficiency)that influence counterfactual processing?Three experiments were carried out to address these questions.Experiment 1used eye-tracking technique and anomaly paradigm to test the “dual representation”versus “single representation” hypothesis of counterfactual processing.I compared eye-movement responses to semantic anomalies in factual and counterfactual context narratives.The anomaly detection effects in counterfactual narratives were overall delayed compared with factual narratives,suggesting increased processing cost caused by dual meaning computation.Experiment 2 proceeded to investigate whether and how context transparency modulates Chinese counterfactual processing.Using event-related potentials,I measured participants' neural activity while they read transparent and nontransparent counterfactual dialogues that contained discourse congruent or incongruent target words.Results revealed that participants' brain response to discourse incongruency appeared earlier in the pragmatic-driven nontransparent context(N400 effects)relative to the nonrealistic transparent context(P600 effects).This indicates that the process of updating and inhibition of the dual representations during counterfactual comprehension is modulated by context constraints: Chinese counterfactual comprehension is highly pragmatics-driven and context-dependent,therefore,the dual representations will be resolved earlier in nontransparent counterfactuals.In addition to context factor,both Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 showed that individuals' cognitive abilities in social cognition,language proficiency and executive functions also mediate the process of how people coordinate the literal suppositional representation and the implied factual representation.People with better capacities in these respects would be better at inferring the counterfactual meaning and resolving the dual-representation competition in real-time language comprehension.Taken together,these results suggest a hybrid processing model that seeks an equilibrium between the dual-representation and single-representation hypothesis: dual representations are initially activated upon the establishment of counterfactuality,but this dual meaning is short lived.In subsequent semantic processing,whether readers directly evaluate upcoming information against the contextually appropriate representation,or they maintain the dual representations in working memory and encounter interference from the alternative representation,depends on context information and individuals' cognitive abilities to resolve the semantic conflicts.To have a full picture of counterfactual processing,Experiment 3 used free narrative writing task to examine counterfactual production,aiming at exploring how Chinese speakers generate spontaneous counterfactual thoughts in their natural language use,and what the regularities are in the sorts of counterfactuals people generate most readily.Results revealed that Chinese speakers do not frequently generate spontaneous counterfactual thoughts.The emotional valence and controllability of the outcome play important roles in triggering counterfactual thinking,but the effects of emotional valence were more significant than the effects of controllability.The functional contents of counterfactual focused on inhibitory events(i.e.,how an unwanted outcome could have been avoided)and internal factors(i.e.,self-relevant,in comparison to external factors).These results suggest that Chinese counterfactual thinking serves important affective functions,and shows a strongly emotional character.This characteristic conceals counterfactual's preparative function,and weakens its logical strength in causal inference/ deductive reasoning.The present study makes the first attempt to investigate the cognitive process underlying Chinese counterfactual comprehension and production.By applying a range of psycholinguistic paradigms,I provide ample evidence that Chinese speakers can quickly access and integrate counterfactual meaning in real-time language processing,and the there is no general deficiency in Chinese speakers' ability to conduct counterfactual reasoning.Importantly,Chinese counterfactual processing exhibits several features that distinct from Indo-European languages: it is highly context-dependent and pragmatics-driven.Chinese counterfactual thinking focuses on the affective function in modulating emotions,which conceals the preparative function in terms of causal inference.These findings provide implications for the broader issue of language and thought: Variations in linguistic forms do not necessarily bring about a general advantage/deficiency in counterfactual reasoning among people who speak different languages.Instead,it is the lifelong experiences with the distinct cultural/social/cognitive patterns underlying the counterfactual expression that reshape our different mindsets and counterfactual thinking modes.As such,language and thought interact with each other in a process of mutual shaping and progression.