Early ERP Evidence for Children’s and Adult’s Sensitivity to Scalar Implicatures Triggered by Existential Quantifiers (Some)

Abstract

How quickly do children and adults interpret scalar lexical items in speech processing? The current study examined interpretation of the scalar terms some vs. all in contexts where either the stronger (some = not all) or the weaker interpretation was permissible (some allows all). Children and adults showed increased negative deflections in brain activity following the word some in some-infelicitous versus some-felicitous contexts. This effect was found as early as 100 ms across central electrode sites (in children), and 300–500 ms across left frontal, fronto-central, and centro-parietal electrode sites (in children and adults). These results strongly suggest that young children (aged between 3 and 4 years) as well as adults quickly have access to the contextually appropriate interpretation of scalar terms.

Electrophysiological evidence of lexical processing impacted by foreign language reading anxiety

“…The N170 reflects early stages of lexical or sub-lexical orthographic processing during word reading [ 26 ]; [ 27 ]; [ 24 ] and is typically left-lateralized [ 23 ]. The second reading-related component is the centro-parietal N400 [ [28] , [29] ], which reflects semantic processing and peaks around 400 ms after stimulus onset. The N400 is sensitive to lexical properties, particularly semantic relatedness [ 30 , [31] , [32] ], and indicates the integration of semantic information during reading.…”