Milica Denic & Vincent Homer & Daniel Rothschild & Emmanuel Chemla (2019). "The influence of polarity items on inferential judgments".

Main information:

Full paper in pdf

R script for the main analyses

Output of the models

Experiment 1	Experiment 2	Experiment 3	Experiment 4
Results file 1	Results file 1	Results file 1	Results file 1
Results file 2	Results file 2	Results file 2	Results file 2
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			Results file 4
Stimuli file 1	Stimuli file 1	Stimuli file 1	Stimuli file 1
Stimuli file 2	Stimuli file 2	Stimuli file 2	Stimuli file 2
Stimuli file 3	Stimuli file 3	Stimuli file 3	Stimuli file 3
			Stimuli file 4

Abstract: Polarity sensitive items are linguistic expressions such as any, at all, some, which are felicitous in some linguistic environments but not others. Crucially, whether a polarity item is felicitous in a given environment is argued to depend on the inferences (in the reasoning sense) that this environment allows. We show that the inferential judgments reported for a given environment are modified in the presence of polarity sensitive items. Hence, there is a two-way influence between linguistic and reasoning abilities: the linguistic acceptability of polarity items is dependent on reasoning facts and, conversely, reasoning judgments can be altered by the mere addition of seemingly innocuous polarity items.

Keywords: modularity; polarity; monotonicity; intuitions; reasoning.