Abstract
Adults received incongruous questions in which the relation implied by the question was incorrect, as in “Why is a cat a dog?” Results showed that when the referents in the question were members of the same category, subjects tended to reject the question fewer times and attempt more answers than when the terms were unrelated. There were also more rejections and fewer attempts to answer the questions when a picture was substituted for one of the verbal referents. The results were interpreted in terms of linguistic pragmatics.
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Winer, G.A., Smith, D.A. & Hemphill, J. Responding to incongruous questions: Effects of making reference to pictures on items referring to related versus unrelated terms. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 25, 377–378 (1987). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330372
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330372