In daily conversations, the literal meanings of an utterance might be different from the implied meanings. Understanding the implied meanings of an utterance is the key to successful communications, making it necessary to study the process of understanding the implied meanings. The process of inferring implied meanings is definded as pragmatic inference which has always been an important topic in pragmatics. Compared with direct reply comprehension, indirect reply comprehension needs pragmatic inference process. And using indirect reply to study pragmatic inference has more ecological validity. Therefore, this study focused on the pragmatic inference process in indirect reply comprehension.
According to dual-process theory, there may be two types of process in the pramatic inference. In the strong lexical association condition, pragmatic inference relies more on heuristic process; in the weak lexical association condition, pragmatic inference relies more on analytical process. This study attempted to study the effect of lexical association on pragmatic inference process, and then to explore the cognitive mechanisms of pragmatic inference.
Based on the different technical advantages of EEG and eye movement, this study used EEG and eye movement respectively. ERP results and eye-tracking results both showed the interaction of lexical association and indirect reply. In the strong lexical association, there was no significant difference between indirect reply and direct reply. In the weak lexical association, indirect reply induced more negative ERP effect and needed more rereading time and total reading time. These results can be well explained by dual-process theory. In the strong lexical association condition, pragmatic inference derived the implied meanings from the lexical association, while in the weak lexical association condition, pragmatic inference required more analysis.
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