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Article published In:
Cognitive Linguistic Studies
Vol. 6:1 (2019) ► pp.185–209

Language as a ‘game changer’ for spontaneous trait inference

| University of Lisbon
| University of Lisbon
| University of Lisbon

This paper provides a summary of the project regarding language and spontaneous trait inference (STI) interaction. For 40 years, different methodologies had been used to study STI. However, these methodologies used sentences to elicit the inference, but they were never controlled from a linguistic point of view. We studied STI behavior when sentences were modified by adverbs of manner and checked linguistic parameters to verify which had more importance when the inference occurred. Results show that not only these adverbs modify the strength for STI, but they sometimes also change which trait is preferably inferred by the participants, adding new traits which were not available if the adverbs were not inferred.

Keywords: linguistics, cognition, inference, personality, cognitive science
Article outline
  • 1.Theoretical background
    • 1.1A background on personality trait inference
    • 1.2A background in linguistics
    • 1.3Inference and language
      • 1.3.1Parsing theories
    • 1.4Adverbs of manner modification
  • 2.Corpus
    • 2.1Creating the traits
    • 2.2Sentence characterization
    • 2.3Preliminary study
      • 2.3.1Preliminary study’s results
    • 2.4Conditions
      • 2.4.1Hypotheses
    • 2.5Adverb creation
  • 3.Main task
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Lists of stimuli
    • 3.3Inference task
    • 3.4Semantic acceptability test
    • 3.5Sentence-by-sentence analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Inference task results
    • 4.2Sentence-by-sentence linguistic analysis
  • 5.General discussion
  • References
Published online: 12 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cogls.00035.mar
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