Extracting information from counterfactual clauses

The results of a timed verification task indicated that people do represent and extract information from the more complex representation, however, when given sufficient time, subjects simplify the complex representation and thereby reduce the number of operations necessary to subsequently verify the information or store it in long-term memory.

Abstract

This study examined how people access the information in a complex grammatical construction like counterfactual clauses, for example, If Mary would have left, Judy would have died. The main issue was whether people would represent this information in a form that reflects its syntactic complexity, for example (false (Mary left)), or whether subjects would simplify the representation, for example (Mary stayed). The results of a timed verification task indicated that people do represent and extract information from the more complex representation. However, when given sufficient time, subjects simplify the complex representation and thereby reduce the number of operations necessary to subsequently verify the information or store it in long-term memory. Furthermore, a second experiment showed that after simplifying the information, subjects can remember performing the simplification and so can reconstruct the original surface structure.