Abstract
This study aims to examine how real-time processing of information about the social status of interlocutors (high vs. low) and the imposition of making a refusal by manipulating the indirectness of invitation forms (declining direct invitations vs. declining indirect invitations) affects the interpretation of refusals in Chinese. The event-related potentials results showed that high-status invitees who decline invitations from low-status inviters elicited weaker N400 effects followed by late mitigated negative effects, while high imposition refusals elicited stronger N400 effects followed by increased late negativities. The two factors of social status and imposition functioned independently during the comprehension of refusal utterances. These findings suggest that individuals take the social status of interlocutors and the imposition of making a refusal into consideration as an utterance unfolds, while face-threatening contexts create inferential difficulties for reinterpreting the pragmatic implications of an utterance.
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The full dataset for the experiment reported here are available upon request and with the permission from School of Foreign Languages, Northeast Normal University.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all the participants in our study. This research would not have been possible without them. Our thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers whose valuable suggestions improved the paper very considerably. Without their illuminating help, this paper would not have appeared in its present form.
Funding
The research was supported by National Social Science Foundation of China under Grant Agreement No 22BYY069.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Ningning Cao and Ling Zhou. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Ningning Cao and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Cao, N., Zhou, L. & Zhang, S. The Effects of Social Status and Imposition on the Comprehension of Refusals in Chinese: An ERP Study. J Psycholinguist Res 52, 1989–2005 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-023-09984-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-023-09984-x