Comprehension can be enriched by considering what a speaker could have said but did not; namely, the alternative. For example, "Betty passed some of her exams" can be interpreted as "Betty passed some but not all of her exams". This enriched interpretation is an example of a scalar implicature. We consider whether the salience and use of the alternative are independent processes in the derivation of scalar implicatures or whether use is dependent on salience. Participants completed three sentence interpretation experiments in which the sentences invited scalar implicatures. The experiments used a structural priming paradigm with alternatives and implicatures as primes. We found that (1) adults could be primed to derive scalar implicatures when the alternative was the prime (2) they did so at a rate equal to if the scalar implicature itself were the prime. In the absence of evidence that the use of the alternative can be primed independently of its salience, we conclude that salience and use are not independent processes. Instead, we suggest that when the alternative is sufficiently salient, the implicature will automatically be derived.

Metonymic words have multiple related meanings, such as college, as in the building (“John walked into the college”) or the educational institution (“John was promoted by the college”). Most researchers have found support for direct access models of metonymy but one recent study, Lowder and Gordon (2013), found delayed reading times for metonymic sentences relative to literal controls, in support of an indirect access account. We conducted a speed-accuracy-tradeoff experiment to test whether their result was caused by lower retrieval probabilities, consistent with direct or indirect access models of metonymy, or slower retrieval dynamics, consistent only with indirect access accounts. We found lower retrieval probabilities for the metonymic sentences but no difference in the dynamics parameters. These results therefore suggest that literal senses do not have priority during processing and that established metonymic senses can be accessed directly.

Priming of pragmatic enrichment has been found in behavioural studies. We extend this by examining the neural correlates of priming for two implicature categories, quantifiers and disjunctions. Participants engaged in a primed sentence-picture matching task where they were presented with a sentence (e.g., "some of the letters are Bs") followed by a picture. In prime trials the pictures were either consistent with an enriched interpretation (some but not all) or a basic interpretation (some and possibly all) of the sentence. The pictures in target trials were always consistent with the enriched interpretation. Using ERPs, we found a priming effect on the picture reflected in a reduced positivity for quantifiers when the preceding trial had an enriched interpretation, and no effect for disjunction. The pragmatic priming effect can be dissociated from expectation-based processes. It suggests that abstract derivation processes are primed during pragmatic alignment.