The experimental literature on the pragmatic abilities of bilinguals is rather sparse. The only study investigating adult second language (L2) learners (Slabakova, 2010) found an increase of pragmatic responses in that population relative to monolinguals. The results of studies on early bilingual children are unclear, some finding a significant increase in pragmatic responses in early bilingual children (preschoolers) relative to monolinguals (Siegal et al., 2007), while another (Antoniou and Katsos, 2017), testing school children, does not. We tested adult French L2 learners of English and Spanish (in their two languages) as well as French monolingual controls in Experiment 1 and Italian-Slovenian early bilingual children (in both languages) and Slovenian monolingual controls in Experiment 2. Our results were similar to those of Antoniou and Katsos (2017) in early bilingual children, but different from those of Siegal et al. (2007). We found no pragmatic bias in adult L2 leaners relative to adult monolinguals.

There is now general agreement about the optionality of scalar implicatures: the pragmatic interpretation will be accessed depending on the context relative to which the utterance is interpreted. The question, then, is what makes a context upper-(vs. lower-) bounding. Neo-Gricean accounts should predict that contexts including factual information will enhance the rate of pragmatic interpretations. Post-Gricean accounts should predict that contexts including psychological attributions will enhance the rate of pragmatic interpretations. We tested two factors using the quantifier scale :(1) the existence of factual information that facilitates the computation of pragmatic interpretations in the context (here, the cardinality of the domain of quantification) and (2) the fact that the context makes the difference between the semantic and the pragmatic interpretations of the target sentence relevant, involving psychological attributions to the speaker (here a question using all). We did three experiments, all of which suggest that while cardinality information may be necessary to the computation of the pragmatic interpretation, it plays a minor role in triggering it; highlighting the contrast between the pragmatic and the semantic interpretations, while it is not necessary to the computation of the pragmatic interpretation, strongly mandates a pragmatic interpretation. These results favor Sperber and Wilson's (1995) post-Gricean account over Chierchia's (2013) neo-Gricean account. Overall, this suggests that highlighting the relevance of the pragmatic vs. semantic interpretations of the target sentence makes a context upper-bounding. Additionally, the results give a small advantage to the post-Gricean account.

One of the most studied scales in the literature on scalar implicatures is the quantifier scale. While the truth of some is entailed by the truth of all , some is felicitous only when all is false. This opens the possibility that some would be felicitous if, e.g., almost all of the objects in the restriction of the quantifier have the property ascribed by the nuclear scope. This prediction from the standard theory of quantifier interpretation clashes with native speakers’ intuitions. In Experiment 1 we report a questionnaire study on the perception of quantifier meanings in English, French, Slovenian, and German which points to a cross-linguistic variation with respect to the perception of numerical bounds of the existential quantifier. In Experiment 2, using a picture choice task, we further examine whether the numerical bound differences correlate with differences in pragmatic interpretations of the quantifier some in English and quelques in French and interpret the results as supporting our hypothesis that some and its cross-linguistic counterparts are subjected to different processes of pragmatic enrichment.

Abstract. There is a vast amount of studies on some forms of implicit communication such as scalar implicatures by monolingual speakers, but few studies have been carried out on the pragmatic capacities of second language learners. The only available data have been collected in Slabakova (2010). This study has shown that L2 learners are more pragmatic than L1 speakers by interpreting a scalar term in their L2. However the replicability of the results has been called into question because of methodological issues and conclusions ignoring empirical data on cognitive processing of scalar implicatures. We therefore used the same experimental material as Slabakova (2010) but improved the methodology and asked two groups of L2 French learners to make a sentence verification task. After a short context, they had to judge an underinformative sentence based on the scalar terms , (). The L2 learners have been tested in their two languages and compared to a sample of French monolinguals. The results of Slabakova (2010) have been replicated since the L2 learners make more inferences in French as monolinguals do. Our results also show that the L2 learners more often derive implicatures in their L1 than monolinguals in the same L1. This suggests that learning a second language has an impact on the way to communicate not only in the L2 but also in the L1.Résumé. Si certaines formes de communication implicite comme les implicatures scalaires ont été l'objet d'un nombre considérable d'études chez les monolingues, peu d'études ont été menées sur les capacités pragmatiques des apprenants de langue seconde (L2). Les seules données disponibles proviennent de l'étude de Slabakova (2010) qui a montré qu'ils sont plus pragmatiques lorsqu'ils interprètent un terme scalaire dans leur L2 que des monolingues. Cependant, des problèmes méthodologiques couplés à des conclusions qui ignorent les données empiriques sur le traitement cognitif des implicatures scalaires remettent en question la réplicabilité des résultats. Nous avons utilisé le même paradigme expérimental que Slabakova (2010) mais en le rendant méthodologiquement plus satisfaisant 1 Etude financée dans le cadre du projet européen AThEME (7° programme cadre de l'UE, agrément n° 613465).