Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

During language comprehension, what guides how wedistinguish between objective facts and subjective opinions?Our three experiments investigate whether people’s ability todetect subjective content – which we indicated by means ofopinion-conveying adjectives (e.g. amazing, frustrating) – ismodulated by the adjective’s structural position. Our resultsindicate that altering the linguistic structure of a sentenceinfluences our perception of how subjective it is: Even whenthe basic information being conveyed is held constant,packaging this information in different ways elicits differentlevels of perceived subjectivity. When a subjective adjectiveoccurs in a structural position associated with newinformation, the text is rated as more subjective compared to atext that conveys the same basic information but has the sameadjective in a position associated with already-knowninformation. This suggests that the difference between factand opinion, or at least our ability to recognize opinion-basedinformation, can be distorted by linguistic packaging.