Understanding How Grammatical Aspect Influences Legal Judgment

• Type of Material: Article
• Authors: Andrew Sherrill, Emory University; Anita Eerland, Utrecht University; Rolf A. Zwaan, Erasmus University; Joseph P. Magliano, Northern Illinois University
• Language: English
• Date: 2015-10-23
• Publisher: Public Library of Science
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: © 2015 Sherrill et al
• License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Final Published Version (URL): http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0141181
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: PLoS ONE
• ISSN: 1932-6203
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 10
• Start Page: e0141181
• End Page: e0141181
• Grant/Funding Information: This research was supported by the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language and Literacy at Northern Illinois University (http://www.niu.edu/cisll/).
• Keywords: ADVANTAGE; PSYCHOLOGY; 1ST MENTION; Multidisciplinary Sciences; Science & Technology; KNOWLEDGE; SITUATION MODELS; PREPOSITIONS; COMPREHENSION; Science & Technology - Other Topics; COHERENCE; REPRESENTATIONS; VERB-ASPECT
• Research Categories: Literature, General; Speech Communication; Psychology, Behavioral

Abstract

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Recent evidence suggests that grammatical aspect can bias how individuals perceive criminal intentionality during discourse comprehension. Given that criminal intentionality is a common criterion for legal definitions (e.g., first-degree murder), the present study explored whether grammatical aspect may also impact legal judgments. In a series of four experiments participants were provided with a legal definition and a description of a crime in which the grammatical aspect of provocation and murder events were manipulated. Participants were asked to make a decision (first- vs. second-degree murder) and then indicate factors that impacted their decision. Findings suggest that legal judgments can be affected by grammatical aspect but the most robust effects were limited to temporal dynamics (i.e., imperfective aspect results in more murder actions than perfective aspect), which may in turn influence other representational systems (i.e., number of murder actions positively predicts perceived intentionality). In addition, findings demonstrate that the influence of grammatical aspect on situation model construction and evaluation is dependent upon the larger linguistic and semantic context. Together, the results suggest grammatical aspect has indirect influences on legal judgments to the extent that variability in aspect changes the features of the situation model that align with criteria for making legal judgments.