Distinguishing speed from accuracy in scalar implicatures

Processing inferences at the semantics/pragmatics frontier: Disjunctions and free choice

“…Bott and Noveck compared response times to the two types of responses and discovered that response times associated with implicatures were slower than to those with literal meanings, in direct contrast to the default model predictions. Bott, Bailey and Grodner (2012) expanded theses experiments to demonstrate that the effects were not due to a speed-accuracy trade-off strategy and that they obtained across different languages, with different control sentences. Furthermore, Chevallier et al (2008) showed that the same delay can be found with scalar implicatures associated with other items (the exclusive reading of or, rather than the not all reading attached to some), which suggests that the processing pattern is quite generally associated with scalar implicatures.…”

“…First, participants would have had to have opposing response criteria and biases across our free choice tasks compared to our scalar implicature task or that of Bott and Noveck in order to explain the opposing pattern of results. Moreover, Bott et al (2012) showed that the effects observed by Bott and Noveck could not be explained using SAT strategies. Since the two tasks were similar in many ways, it seems unlikely that SAT strategies could explain the difference we observe between free choice inferences and scalar implicatures.…”

“…More recently, psycholinguists have began to investigate how various sorts of inferences are processed, adding a new kind of data to the debates, and with the ultimate goal of understanding how pragmatic principles might be instantiated in the human language processor. The most extensive investigations have been conducted on a kind of inference that we introduce in Section 1.1, so-called "scalar implicatures" (e.g., Bott & Noveck, 2004;Bott, Bailey & Grodner, 2012;Breheny, Katsos & Williams, 2006;Huang & Snedeker, 2008;Grodner, Klein et al, 2010;Nieuwland, Ditman, Kuperberg, 2010;Tomlinson, Bailey, & Bott, 2013), but work has also been completed on manner implicatures (Bott, Frisson & Murphy, 2008) and presuppositions (Chemla & Bott, 2013). The experiments in this paper investigate another type of implicature, free choice inferences, which arise from disjunctive sentences.…”

L’impact de l’apprentissage d’une langue seconde sur les capacités pragmatiques : le cas des implicatures scalaires

“…Une hypothèse alternative est qu'établir le lien entre le terme faible et l'interprétation pragmatique demande plus de temps (Blutner 2007). Les études réalisées sur des populations adultes basées sur les temps de réaction semblent cependant confirmer qu'accéder à l'interprétation pragmatique est plus difficile cognitivement parlant que d'accéder à l'interprétation sémantique (Bott & Noveck 2004, Huang & Snedeker 2009, Bott et al 2012.…”

Are intermediate levels of the scale used during online comprehension of scalar implicatures?

“…The investigation of how, when, and under what circumstances the scalar inference (the interpretation of SOME as meaning NOT ALL) arises during online processing constitutes a major area of inquiry in experimental pragmatics, and has been addressed using a wide variety of methods (speeded verification: Bott & Noveck, 2004;Bott et al, 2011;Noveck & Posada, 2003;Feeney et al, 2004;reading times: Breheny et al, 2006;Lewis & Phillips, 2011;Hartshorne & Snedeker, in press;visual world: Huang & Snedeker, 2009;Panizza et al, 2009;Grodner et al, 2009;Degen & Tanenhaus, 2011;event-related potentials: Noveck & Posada, 2003;Nieuwland et al, 2010;Politzer-Ahles et al, in press;Hunt et al, in press). These studies have reached different conclusions about whether the NOT ALL meaning of SOME is generated rapidly or at a delay, and whether or not it guides readers' predictions about upcoming lexical items as the rest of the sentence unfolds.…”