Some effort for some: Further evidence that scalar implicatures are effortful

Abstract

Under the assumption of the principle of cooperation (Grice, 1989), a statement such as "some eels are fish" is thought to be false since it contains less information than is considered sufficient. However, the statement is logically sound since the meaning of "some" is compatible with "all". Currently, the primary interpretation of such underinformative statements remains subject to debate. According to Levinson (2000), the pragmatic "some but not all" interpretation is the default interpretation, while others (e.g., Sperber & Wilson, 1995) argue that this pragmatic interpretation only comes to the fore when relevant within the context and is thus considered secondary to the logical "some and perhaps all" interpretation. In this study, three factors that may influence the answer pattern are studied: task load, working memory capacity, and repetition of the statements. In Experiment 1, we used a secondary task paradigm to manipulate the cognitive load under which a number of underinformative statements had to be judged. We observed that for participants with a rather limited working memory span it is harder to reach a pragmatic interpretation under cognitive load. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the repetition of the statements. We observed that with a higher number of filler statements, participants produced fewer consistent answer patterns. This study provides further evidence against the automaticity of the pragmatic interpretation: It shows that the pragmatic interpretation requires more cognitive effort than the logical interpretation and that increasing the number of filler statements inhibits the development of a response strategy.

The neural computation of scalar implicature

“…Considerable evidence has accumulated indicating that interpreting a scalar term pragmatically (e.g., some-but-not-all ) takes longer and requires more cognitive resources than interpreting it semantically (e.g., at least some ), which many researchers have argued is the opposite of what one would expect if implicatures are always calculated lexically and then cancelled as needed (Bott, Bailey, & Grodner, 2012; Bott & Noveck, 2004; De Neys & Schaeken, 2007; Dieussaert, Verkerk, Gillard & Schaeken, 2011; Feeney et al, 2004; Huang & Snedeker, 2009a, 2011; Marty, Chemla, & Spector, 2013; Noveck & Posada, 2003; but see Grodner et al, 2010). Whether this is a fatal argument depends on exactly what the underlying processing model looks like, and how the underlying processing gets transformed into the manifestations that we can measure (e.g., reaction time).…”

“…Not only does that suggestion hard to reconcile with Bergen and Grodner (2012), who found slower reading of some when scalar implicatures were calculated, it would require re-consideration of a large body of literature suggesting that scalar implicature calculation is slow (Bott, Bailey, & Grodner, 2012; Bott & Noveck, 2004; Feeney et al, 2004; Huang & Snedeker, 2009a, 2011; Noveck & Posada, 2003; but see Grodner et al, 2010) and requires considerable computational resources (De Neys & Schaeken, 2007; Dieussaert, Verkerk, Gillard, & Schaeken, 2011; Marty, Chemla, & Spector, 2013). …”

Scalar implicatures: working memory and a comparison with only

“…Capitalizing on Bott and Noveck (2004) paradigm and results, De Neys and Schaeken (2007) investigated the nature of the cost associated with SIs (see also Dieussaert et al, 2011; Marty et al, 2013). Specifically, they tested the hypothesis that the cognitive operations underlying the generation of scalar inferences involve the central component of the working memory system, whose executive resources are well-known to play a substantial role in high-order cognition (e.g., Engle et al, 1999; Kane and Engle, 2002; Kane et al, 2004; De Neys, 2006; De Neys and Verschueren, 2006).…”

“…The cognitive effort associated with the processing of SIs involves central memory resources (De Neys and Schaeken, 2007; Dieussaert et al, 2011; Marty et al, 2013). The goal of this study is to locate this previous result within the current psycholinguistic debate, and to understand at which level of SI processing these resources are specifically involved.…”

‘But’ Implicatures: A Study of the Effect of Working Memory and Argument Characteristics

“…When working memory was burdened, pragmatic inferences dropped by 10%. Marty et al (2013) replicated this working memory load effect associated with computing the scalar implicature from some (see also Noveck and Posada, 2003; Huang and Snedeker, 2009; Dieussaert et al, 2011). …”