Abstract
Conditionals are central to inference. Before people can draw inferences
about a natural language conditional, they must interpret its meaning. We
investigated interpretation of uncertain conditionals using a probabilistic
truth table task, focussing on (i) conditional event, (ii) material conditional, and (iii) conjunction interpretations. The order of object (shape)
and feature (color) in each conditional's antecedent and consequent was
varied between participants. The conditional event was the dominant
interpretation, followed by conjunction, and took longer to process than
conjunction (mean dierence 500 ms). Material conditional responses were
rare. The proportion of conditional event responses increased from around
40% at the beginning of the task to nearly 80% at the end, with 55% of
participants showing a qualitative shift of interpretation. Shifts to the
conditional event occurred later in the feature-object order than in the
object-feature order. We discuss the results in terms of insight and suggest implications for theories of interpretation.