Behavioral experiments reveal that question phrasing guides explanation generation toward focal grammatical subjects, highlighting how pragmatic cues structure semantic search.
Key Points
To investigate how the phrasing and grammatical focus of 'why' questions direct human exploration of semantic space during explanation generation.
Conducted two behavioral experiments manipulating comparison keyword order and grammatical subject assignments within 'why' questions.
Assessed how closely participant-generated explanations aligned with comparison keywords using a pre-trained machine learning language model.
Study 1 demonstrated that generated explanations aligned more closely with the keyword presented earlier in the question prompt.
Study 2 showed that when keyword order and grammatical role were separated, participants generated explanations primarily aligned with the grammatical subject rather than the first-mentioned word.