Irony as a Test of the Presupposition-Denial Account: An ERP Study.

According to the Presupposition-Denial Account, complement set reference arises when focus is on the shortfall between the amount conveyed by a natural language quantifier and a larger, expected amount. Negative quantifiers imply a shortfall, through the denial of a presupposition, whereas positive quantifiers do not. An exception may be provided by irony.

Negation in context: Evidence from the visual world paradigm.

Literature assumes that negation is more difficult to understand than affirmation, but this might depend on the pragmatic context. The goal of this paper is to show that pragmatic knowledge modulates the unfolding processing of negation due to the previous activation of the negated situation. To test this, we used the visual world paradigm.

Perception problems of the verbal scale.

Many forensic scientists use a verbal scale to describe the significance or weight to be attached to their opinion. Although there is a considerable amount of work in the field of psychology regarding people's perception of quantitative descriptors such as those used in the verbal scale, there has been no published work relating to the use of such descriptors in a forensic context. Our aim was to assess the extent to which the verbal expressions used by the expert in court are perceived and the extent to which they are differentiated by potential jurors.

Strengthening handover communication in pediatric cardiac intensive care.

Objective: To evaluate knowledge transfer and perceptions using a structured handover process for the postoperative pediatric cardiac patient being admitted to intensive care. The hypothesis being that knowledge transfer could be optimized by the implementation of this handover structure.

Aim: To investigate the effects of the implementation of a structured handover in the intensive care unit, including preadmission cardiac reports and operating room information.

Anaphoric reference to quantified antecedents: an event-related brain potential study.

We report an event-related brain potential (ERP) study examining how readers process sentences containing anaphoric reference to quantified antecedents. Previous studies indicate that positive (e.g.

The on-line processing of written irony.

We report an eye-tracking study in which we investigate the on-line processing of written irony. Specifically, participants' eye movements were recorded while they read sentences which were either intended ironically, or non-ironically, and subsequent text which contained pronominal reference to the ironic (or non-ironic) phrase. Results showed longer reading times for ironic comments compared to a non-ironic baseline, suggesting that additional processing was required in ironic compared to non-ironic conditions.

Perspective in statements of quantity, with implications for consumer psychology.

We demonstrate that presentation of information about quantities, whether expressed in natural language or by using numbers, induces a perspective that influences subsequent processing. Experiment 1 shows this to be true for natural language quantifiers, with negative and positive expressions inducing different perspectives. In Experiment 2, we examined the application of this idea to the specific case of perspectives induced by describing products as containing x% fat or as being x% fat free.