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Relation between understanding and agreeing in response to one-sentence assertion*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2014

YASUHIRO OZURU ,
DAVID BOWIE  and
GIULIA KAUFMAN
YASUHIRO OZURU*
Affiliation:
University of Alaska Anchorage
DAVID BOWIE
Affiliation:
University of Alaska Anchorage
GIULIA KAUFMAN
Affiliation:
University of Alaska Anchorage
*
†Address for correspondence: Yasuhiro Ozuru, Department of Psychology, University of Alaska Anchorage. e-mail: yozuru@uaa.alaska.edu
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Abstract

Three quasi-experimental studies were conducted to investigate the relationship between the evaluative (i.e., agree/true) and the meta-cognitive (i.e., understand) response, and to determine which type of response people are more likely to provide when responding to one-sentence assertive statements. In Studies 1 and 2, participants performed two separate tasks in which they were asked to indicate the levels of: (i) understanding and (ii) agreement / perceived truthfulness of 126 one-sentence statements. The results indicated that participants were likely to provide a negative evaluative response (i.e., disagree/false) to a statement that they did not understand. In Study 3, participants were asked to evaluate the same 126 statements and choose between four response options: agree, disagree, understand, do not understand. The results indicated that people are more likely provide an evaluative response regardless of the understandability of a statement. The results of these studies are discussed in relation to (i) pragmatic perspective of how people infer speakers’ meaning, and (ii) cognitive processes underlying evaluative and meta-cognitive response.

Keywords

pragmaticssentence comprehensionsentence evaluationcognition
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 36 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2014 

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