Center for the Study of Language and Information

In this experiment, you will be shown a series of sentences and asked to indicate what you think the author meant. In some cases, you might be asked how you would express the same meaning. The experiment should take about 15 minutes.

Please do this experiment ONLY if you are a native speaker of English, i.e. if English was the language spoken in your home when you were a child. If you are not a native English speaker, your results will be invalid.

Consent Form

Please read through the following information before starting the task.

ENGLISH COMPREHENSION EXPERIMENTS

Protocol Directors: Stanley Peters and Cleo Condoravdi

We invite you to participate in a research study on English language comprehension. You will be asked to do a linguistic task such as reading sentences and responding to questions about them.

There are no risks or benefits of any kind involved in this study.

You will be paid for your participation at the posted rate.

If you have read this form and have decided to participate in this experiment, please understand your participation is voluntary and you have the right to withdraw your consent or discontinue participation at any time without penalty or loss of benefits to which you are otherwise entitled. You have the right to refuse to do particular tasks. Your individual privacy will be maintained in all published and written data resulting from the study. You may print this form for your records.

CONTACT INFORMATION:

If you have any questions, concerns or complaints about this research study, its procedures, risks and benefits, you should contact one of the Protocol Directors, Stanley Peters (+1-650-725-2318) or Cleo Condoravdi (+1-650-387-5041).

If you are not satisfied with how this study is being conducted, or if you have any concerns, complaints, or general questions about the research or your rights as a participant, please contact the Stanford Institutional Review Board (IRB) to speak to someone independent of the research team at (+1-650-723-2480) or toll free (within the United States) at 1-866-680-2906. You can also write to the Stanford IRB, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5401, USA.

If you agree to participate, please proceed to the study tasks by clicking the START button.

Instructions

In each task, you will be shown a statement and you will be given two possible interpretations of what the author seems to believe, Select the one that you think represents the author's belief based on the statement without making use of any information you might have independently. If the statement does not provide you with the right information to conclude what the author has in mind or if you for some other reason cannot decide, choose the "Cannot decide" option.

In some cases, you might be presented with a couple follow-up questions. For these questions, you will be asked to indicate if you could say the sentence to imply what the author seems to imply. If this is an acceptable way of expressing the intended meaning for you, select Yes. Only select No if you could not say this sentence to imply the same thing. If you select No, you will be asked how you would have implied the same thing using nearly the same words.

ANSWER: The correct answer is A: John stopped the car because if the author says that John managed to stop the car, and is being truthful, the author must assume that, overcoming some difficulty, John actually stopped the car.

ANSWER: The correct answer is B: Linda didn't call her mother because if the author says that Linda forgot to call her mother, and is being truthful, the author must assume that Linda didn't call her mother even though she had intended to do so.

ANSWER: The correct answer is C: Cannot decide because the statement that Fred was determined to retire at the end of the year does not indicate whether the author has any belief about whether Fred in fact retired or didn't retire at the end of the year.

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Choose one answer based only on the given sentence.