•Three readings can be experimentally distinguished for scalar implicatures.•The strongest reading is accessible even if the speaker is not presented as fully knowledgeable.•Alleged scalar items ...differ in the accessibility of the three readings.
An utterance of Some of the students are home usually triggers the inference that it is not the case that the speaker believes that all students are home (Primary Scalar Implicature). It may also license a stronger inference: that the speaker believes that not all students are home (Secondary Scalar Implicature). Using an experimental paradigm which allows to distinguish between these three distinct readings as such (literal reading, primary SI, secondary SI), we show that the secondary SI can be accessed even in contexts where the speaker is not presented as being well-informed, a result which goes against classical neo-Gricean pragmatic approaches to Scalar Implicature, but is compatible with both the ‘grammatical’ approach to Scalar Implicatures and some more recent game-theoretic pragmatic models in which speakers and listeners engage in sophisticated higher-order reasoning about each other. Second, we use this paradigm to compare standard scalar items such as some and expressions whose interpretation has been argued to involve SIs, but controversially: almost, numerals and plural morphology. For some and almost, we find that speakers do access three distinct readings, but for numerals and plural morphology, only the literal reading and the secondary implicature could be detected, and no primary implicature, which suggests that the pragmatic and semantic mechanisms at play are different for both types of items.
Sentences can be enriched by considering what the speaker does not say but could have done. Children, however, struggle to derive one type of such enrichments, scalar implicatures. A popular ...explanation for this, the lexical alternatives account, is that they do not have lexical knowledge of the appropriate alternatives to generate the implicature. Namely, children are unaware of the scalar relationship between some and all. We conducted a priming study with N = 72 children, aged 5;1 years, and an adult sample, N = 51, to test this hypothesis. Participants were exposed to prime trials of strong, alternative, or weak sentences involving scalar or ad hoc expressions, and then saw a target trial that could be interpreted in either way. Consistent with previous studies, children were reluctant to derive scalar implicatures. However, there were two novel findings. (1) Children responded with twice the rate of ad hoc implicature responses than adults, suggesting that the implicature was the developmentally prior interpretation for ad hoc expressions. (2) Children showed robust priming effects, suggesting that children are aware of the scalar relationship between some and all, even if they choose not to derive the implicature. This suggests that the root cause of the scalar implicature deficit is not due to the absence of lexical knowledge of the relationship between some and all.
•This study tests a popular explanation for children’s difficulty with scalar implicatures, the lexical alternatives account.•Children responded with twice the rate of ad hoc implicature responses than adults.•Children showed robust priming effects between some and all.•Children's difficulty with scalar implicatures is not due to the absence of lexical knowledge of the relationship between some and all.
A highly emblematic paradigm in experimental pragmatics consists in presenting participants with an existentially quantified sentence of the form Some X are Y in a context in which all X are ...obviously Y. Participants who reject such sentences as false or infelicitous are said to adopt a ‘pragmatic’ instead of a ‘logical’ reading of some, and to derive the scalar implicature Some, but not all X are Y. Although there are several competing accounts of scalar implicatures, virtually all of them assume that a participant who responds pragmatically to an under-informative some-sentence mentally entertains a linguistic representation of the negation of a stronger alternative (All X are Y). Yet, there is no evidence that judging an under-informative some-sentence false or infelicitous actually involves the derivation of the some, but not all scalar implicature. We report three experiments consisting of a sentence-picture verification task followed by a forced choice between two paraphrases of the sentence initially assessed. These experiments robustly show that hearers who reject an under-informative some-sentence do so without explicitly entertaining a some, but not all implicature. Our results represent a strong challenge for grammatical accounts of scalar implicature, which all presuppose a mechanism of negation of stronger alternatives, and force a drastic reinterpretation of processing data on scalar implicatures. More generally, our findings show that one should not conflate psychological models of pragmatic processing with a reconstructed link between sentences and their potential meanings.
•Traditional studies on scalar implicatures assume the Explicit Derivation Hypothesis.•This hypothesis is that pragmatic responses correspond to scalar implicatures.•In Phase 1, we use the same tasks that routinely feature in the relevant literature.•But, additionally, in Phase 2 we prompt participants to reflect on their judgement.•There is no congruence between pragmatic responses and implicature derivation.•A central assumption of experimental pragmatics lacks empirical grounds.
An underinformative sentence, such as Some cats are mammals, is trivially true with a semantic (some and perhaps all) reading of the quantifier and false with a pragmatic (some but not all) one, with ...the latter reliably resulting in longer response times than the former in a truth evaluation task (Bott & Noveck, 2004). Most analyses attribute these prolonged reaction times, or costs, to the steps associated with the derivation of the scalar implicature. In the present work we investigate, across three experiments, whether such slowdowns can be attributed (at least partly) to the participant's need to adjust to the speaker's informative intention. In Experiment 1, we designed a web-based version of Bott & Noveck's (2004) laboratory task that would most reliably provide its classic results. In Experiment 2 we found that over the course of an experimental session, participants' pragmatic responses to underinformative sentences are initially reliably long and ultimately comparable to response times of logical interpretations to the same sentences. Such results cannot readily be explained by assuming that implicature derivation is a consistent source of processing effort. In Experiment 3, we further tested our account by examining how response times change as a function of the number of people said to produce the critical utterances. When participants are introduced (via a photo and description) to a single ‘speaker’, the results are similar to those found in Experiment 2. However, when they are introduced to two ‘speakers’, with the second ‘speaker’ appearing midway (after five encounters with underinformative items), we found a significant uptick in pragmatic response latencies to the underinformative item right after participants' meet their second speaker (i.e. at their sixth encounter with an underinformative item). Overall, we interpret these results as suggesting that at least part of the cost typically attributed to the derivation of a scalar implicature is actually a consequence of how participants think about the informative intentions of the person producing the underinformative sentences.
•Trial order effects were investigated with respect to B&N's (2004) underinformative items, such as Some cats are mammals•We report early-late effects (exceptional slowdowns early in an experimental session) for “pragmatic” false responses•We argue that early-late effects are due to participants’ efforts to determine speaker intentions•We thus question the assumption that deriving a scalar implicature (Some being enriched to Not all) accounts for slowdowns•Experiment 1 varied factors from B&N (2004) to find the sweet spot that best reproduces its well-known effects online
The interpretation of tenses on the boundary of pragmatics and semantics has long been a contested topic, and little attention has been paid to the hierarchical order of readings and the contextual ...dynamicity of that order. The present paper provides a prominence-based account of the pragmatics of tenses and applies it to the semantic indeterminacy of the Romance imperfect. Firstly, I introduce the notion of meaning prominence. It incorporates precontextual factors based on the cognitive notion of salience, such as frequency, prototypicality and conventionality, and contextual factors, which are related to the information density of the given context. Secondly, I define the imperfect on a scale of factuality to illustrate how prominence (re)shifting occurs as a result of the interplay between the R-implicated factual reading and the Q-implicated counterfactual reading. Finally, I discuss how meaning prominence may be incorporated into a recently postulated, generalising definition of prominence.
•A prominence-based account of the pragmatics of tenses is proposed.•It differentiates between precontextually induced and context-induced prominence.•Context-induced prominence is related to the given context information density.•The imperfect receives a scalar interpretation to illustrate meaning prominence.•Prominence shifting between factuality and counterfactuality is illustrated.
•This study explores why scalar implicatures are slow in some contexts and fast in others.•Inferences were faster with consistent set descriptions but were unaffected by prosody.•Judgments and ...production of descriptions varied with the discourse and predictability.•These results indicate that scalar implicatures are often delayed during comprehension.•Reference restriction is rapid when set descriptions can be formulated beforehand.
Experimental pragmatics has gained many insights from understanding how people use weak scalar terms (like some) to infer that a stronger alternative (like all) is false. Early studies found that comprehenders initially interpret some without an upper bound, but later results suggest that this inference is sometimes immediate (e.g., Grodner, Klein, Carbary, & Tanenhaus, 2010). The present paper explores whether rapid inferencing depends on the prosody (i.e., summa rather than some of) or predictability of referring expressions (e.g., consistently using some to describe subsets). Eye-tracking experiments examined looks to subsets (2-of-4 socks) and total sets (3-of-3 soccer balls) following some and found early preferences for subsets in predictable contexts but not in less predictable contexts (Experiment 1 and 2). In contrast, there was no reliable prosody effect on inferencing. Changes in predictability did not affect judgments of the naturalness of some, when a discourse context was available (Experiment 3). However, predictable contexts reduced variability in speakers’ descriptions of subsets and total sets (Experiment 4). Together, these results demonstrate that scalar inferences are often delayed during comprehension, but reference restriction is rapid when set descriptions can be formulated beforehand.
•We investigated the computation of both scalar (including number and quantifier) and ad-hoc implicatures in Mandarin-speaking 4–8-year-old autistic verbal children.•Our results underscore the ...overall delayed implicature knowledge of autistic children at this stage of pragmatic development.•Autistic children's low sensitivity to the implicatures is related to their core ToM deficits.•Our data confirm the coherent pattern of the earlier acquisition of number over quantifier implicatures and illuminate the distinct mechanisms underlying the computation of scalar vs. ad-hoc implicatures.
Mixed findings have been reported about the computation of scalar or/and ad-hoc implicatures in primarily school-age autistic verbal children and adolescents: while some studies reported their struggles with both implicatures, others observed their strengths in computing scalar implicatures. This study extends the previous investigation by testing the derivation of scalar (including both number and quantifier) and ad-hoc implicatures of a younger group of Mandarin-speaking autistic 4–8-year-olds; moreover, we assess the biological, linguistic, and cognitive factors affecting children's implicature acquisition.
The participants included 22 4–8-year-old autistic verbal children (mean age = 67.64 months) and 19 typically developing (TD) children who did not significantly differ in age, receptive vocabulary, and non-verbal IQ. Both groups completed a computer-based Truth Value Judgment task, assessing their knowledge of scalar (involving the number ‘three’ and the quantifier ‘some’) and ad-hoc implicatures. We also examined whether their implicature computation was linked to age, receptive vocabulary, non-verbal IQ, and Theory of Mind (ToM).
Compared with the TD controls, autistic children derived significantly fewer scalar and ad-hoc implicatures. Specifically, TD children successfully computed number and ad-hoc implicatures, contrasting to the bimodal distribution of their pragmatic vs. logical responses to quantifier implicatures. Though autistic children performed better with number implicatures slightly above the chance level, they had difficulties in computing quantifier and ad-hoc implicatures. Further, autistic children's knowledge of the number and ad-hoc implicatures was linked to their ToM skills.
These findings underscore the overall delayed implicature knowledge of young autistic children, and their low sensitivity to the implicatures is related to the core ToM deficits. Furthermore, our data confirm the coherent pattern of the earlier acquisition of number over quantifier implicatures and illuminate the distinct mechanisms underlying the computation of scalar vs. ad-hoc implicatures.
Language has a rich typology of inferential types. It was recently shown that subjects are able to divide the informational content of new visual stimuli among the various slots of the inferential ...typology: when gestures or visual animations are used in lieu of specific words in a sentence, they can trigger the very same inferential types as language alone (Tieu et al.,
2019
). How general are the relevant triggering algorithms? We show that they extend to the auditory modality and to music cognition. We tested whether pro-speech musical gestures, i.e. musical excerpts that replace words in sentences, can give rise to the same inferences. We show that it is possible to replicate the same typology of inferences using pro-speech music. Minimal and complex musical excerpts can behave just like language, gestures, and visual animations with respect to the logical behavior of their content when embedded in sentences. Specifically, we found that pro-speech music can generate scalar implicatures, presuppositions, supplements, and homogeneity inferences.
Probabilistic pragmatics aspires to explain certain regularities of language use and interpretation as behavior of speakers and listeners
who want to satisfy their conversational interests in a ...context that may contain a substantial amount of uncertainty. This approach differs
substantially from more familiar approaches in theoretical pragmatics. To set it apart, we here work out some of its key distinguishing
features and show, by way of some simple examples, how probabilistic pragmatics instantiates these.
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