Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present study employed a creativity-on-demand task to investigate the variability of discourse biases associated with Implicit Causality verbs when language users are demanded to come up with original discourse continuations. While Implicit Causality turned out to be unaffected by the creativity manipulation, the likelihood to continue with a contiguity relation was influenced by the creativity manipulation. These findings are in line with the Two-Mechanism Account by Solstad & Bott (2022, 2023) grounding Implicit Causality in semantic constraints imposed by lexical semantics and relating other next-mention biases to the Contiguity Principle, a more general discourse pragmatic principle.