Selecting presuppositions in conditional clauses. Results from a psycholinguistic experiment.

In this paper we propose an experiment concerning the presupposition selection in conditional sentences containing a presupposition trigger in the consequent. Data collected suggest that the selection in conditional sentences with a trigger in the consequent is affected by speakers’ cognitive load: if speakers are highly cognitive loaded, then they are less led to select a conditional presupposition . This second result heavily depends on the relevance of the context of cognitive effort that affects the capacity of processing the mental representations of the conditional and unconditional presuppositions.