Some inferences still take time: Prosody, predictability, and the speed of scalar implicatures

Abstract

Experimental pragmatics has gained many insights from understanding how people use weak scalar terms (like some) to infer that a stronger alternative (like all) is false. Early studies found that comprehenders initially interpret some without an upper bound, but later results suggest that this inference is sometimes immediate (e.g., Grodner, Klein, Carbary, & Tanenhaus, 2010). The present paper explores whether rapid inferencing depends on the prosody (i.e., summa rather than some of) or predictability of referring expressions (e.g., consistently using some to describe subsets). Eye-tracking experiments examined looks to subsets (2-of-4 socks) and total sets (3-of-3 soccer balls) following some and found early preferences for subsets in predictable contexts but not in less predictable contexts (Experiment 1 and 2). In contrast, there was no reliable prosody effect on inferencing. Changes in predictability did not affect judgments of the naturalness of some, when a discourse context was available (Experiment 3). However, predictable contexts reduced variability in speakers' descriptions of subsets and total sets (Experiment 4). Together, these results demonstrate that scalar inferences are often delayed during comprehension, but reference restriction is rapid when set descriptions can be formulated beforehand.

Another look at the online processing of scalar inferences: an investigation of conflicting findings from visual-world eye-tracking studies

“…Huang and Snedeker argue that verbal-encoding should be discouraged because it is inefficient to pre-code the referent with a single type of description. Huang and Snedeker (2018) provide empirical evidence supporting the verbal-encoding hypothesis. Using the same paradigm as Huang and Snedeker (2009), they conducted a between-subjects study manipulating the presence of number instructions.…”

“…However, this top-down strategy will bypass bottom-up analysis including establishing the semantic meaning in both conditions and deriving the not all inference in some condition. Thus, Huang and Snedeker (2018) suggest that no difference between some and all found in studies without numbers could be the result of verbalencoding rather than the rapid integration of scalar inference.…”

“…Two different hypotheses have been put forward. The verbal-encoding hypothesis, proposed by Huang and Snedeker (2018), postulates that if there is only one way of referring to the referent, participants may implicitly pre-label the visual referent and such labelling can speed up referent identification in visual-world studies. Consider visual-world studies without numbers, where the referent is only described using quantifier phrases (e.g.…”

“…This finding is in line with the prediction of the verbal-encoding hypothesis. Therefore, according to Huang and Snedeker (2018), the processing of pragmatic some is still delayed, when there is no delay associated with pragmatic some, verbal-encoding is at play.…”

“…In particular, using the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm, psycholinguistic studies compared the timing of integrating pragmatic some with the timing of accessing the semantic interpretation of all. Some of these studies found a delay in integrating the pragmatic inference relative to the semantic interpretation (Huang & Snedeker, 2009, 2018, whereas others reported a rapid integration (Breheny et al, 2013;Grodner et al, 2010).…”