Inefficient understanding of non-factive mental verbs with social aspect in adults: comparison to cognitive factive verb processing

• Published in: Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment Vol. 14; pp. 2617 - 2631
• Main Authors: Nazlidou, Elena-Ioanna, Moraitou, Despina, Natsopoulos, Demetrios, Papaliagkas, Vasileios, Masoura, Elvira, Papantoniou, Georgia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New Zealand Dove Medical Press Limited 2018; Taylor & Francis Ltd; Dove Medical Press
• Subjects: Adults; Affirmation; Age; Cognition & reasoning; Factivity – Nonfactivity; Geriatrics; Language; Lifespan development; Linguistics; Memory; Natural language processing; Negation; Neurophysiology; Original Research; Philosophers; Psychology; Semantics; Short-term memory; Situation models; Syntax; Greece; New York; United States > US; heuristic ways of thinking; affirmation/negation; cognitive factive mental verbs; non-factive mental verbs; verbs denoting obligation or intention
• ISSN: 1176-6328; 1178-2021; 1178-2021
• DOI: 10.2147/NDT.S165893

Mental verbs denote inner mental states and are an important link between language and Theory of Mind ability conceptualized as mental state understanding. Non-factive mental verbs denote an obligation or intention and constitute a discrete class of mental verbs which are characterized by their social aspect. This study aimed to examine adults' ability to understand non-factive mental verbs with the social aspect as compared to cognitive factive mental verbs which denote a true event.
A total of 94 participants, aged 18-95 years, were examined using two tasks measuring non-factive and factive verb processing, respectively, and a working memory test.
The results indicated that non-factive verbs process is at a significantly lower level than those of cognitive factives.
The inspection of the way adapted to process the non-factive verbs denoting obligation or intention, as well as the confirmation of a unifactorial structure of the task developed to measure non-factives' processing, showed that adults have a common pattern of non-factive mental verb understanding, which is based on heuristic ways of thinking and is not affected by working memory capacity and age.