On the Variability of Scalar Implicature Computation: Evidence from L2 English Adults

When we say that Some people have lungs, we implicate that not all people have lungs. This scalar implicature arises when we produce a weaker expression instead of a stronger one. Studies on bilingual adults suggest that L2 learners, regardless of their proficiency level, are sensitive to under-informative sentences and they exhibit a superior pragmatic ability on a par with monolingual control groups. However, the evidence obtained from these studies is largely one-dimensional stemming from offline tasks that provide limited information about scalar implicature processing. The present study addressed this issue by investigating scalar implicature computation among L2 adults using an online sentence verification paradigm similar to that of Bott and Noveck whereby participants are required to judge the veracity of categorical under-informative sentences. The study also examined how individual differences in personality traits and L2 proficiency level would modulate participants’ pragmatic responses and processing times. Our results showed that those with weaker English proficiency tended to be significantly less sensitive to implicatures than those with proficiency advantage. The two proficiency groups also took significantly longer processing times to compute the pragmatic interpretation than the logical interpretation. The results further revealed that the pragmatic responses and their processing slowdowns were influenced by various personality and autistic traits. Our findings provide novel empirical insights into how L2 learners process scalar implicatures, and thus useful implications for the processing theories in experimental pragmatics and second language acquisition.

Ira Noveck: Experimental Pragmatics. The Making of a Cognitive Science

The review of Noveck’s Experimental Pragmatics shows that the book is a much-needed synthesis. It provides a mostly ToM- and Grice-based interpretation of experimental results in scalar inference, deixis, and logical errors. The main missing points are related to an almost exclusively descriptive view of language, and the under-elaboration of the issue of the background of knowledge processes. Rather than as a whole, the book shall be a central starting point for further broader approaches to the emerging field of experimental research in pragmatics.

Preschoolers’ Metaphor Comprehension. Methodological Issues in Experimental Pragmatics

There exists a variety of theoretical frameworks attempting to account for the nature, comprehension, and use of everyday metaphor. Since these frameworks use different operational definitions of metaphor, they tend to view the psycholinguistic process of comprehending metaphorical language and the various factors that may play a role in metaphor processing from different perspectives. The first part of the paper briefly summarizes four of these theoretical approaches to everyday metaphor (Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Similarity Theory, Relevance Theory, and the Optimal Innovation Hypothesis) and discusses some consequences of the diversity of theories that present a puzzle or prove to be undesirable for empirical research. The areas discussed include the various dimensions of metaphor categorization, the role of linguistic context, and the effects of linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive skills of the comprehender. Drawing on the discussion in the first part, the second part of the paper outlines an experiment designed with reference to Giora’s Optimal Innovation Hypothesis in which preschoolers’ metaphor comprehension is explored as a function of the familiarity of the expression’s literal meaning and the perceived creativity of the metaphorical use. This experiment further explores the relationship between children’s metaphor comprehension and other cognitive abilities such as intention attribution. This method allows us to quantify metaphor comprehension and preference in the context of pragmatic development and general cognitive skills.

Experimental Pragmatics

An important distinction in the investigation of meaning is that between semantics and pragmatics. One way to characterize this distinction is as the meaning associated with words and morphemes and how they are combined, on the one hand, with additional information arising from implicit or explicit reasoning on the part of the hearer on speaker’s communicative intentions, on the other. Experimental pragmatics is the investigation of the pragmatic components of meaning through psycholinguistic methods. The field has its roots in theoretical and experimental investigations of language, some of which had paid extensive attention to the role of contextual information in a variety of linguistic phenomena. It is only in the last twenty years, however, that the field of experimental pragmatic has really taken shape. In the early 21st century, there has been an explosion of experimental investigations, starting on implicatures in particular, and then extending to all sorts of pragmatic phenomena. Experimental pragmatics is now a dynamic area of research, bringing together theoretical, experimental, and computational linguists, with dedicated conferences, journals, and edited collections. The scope of work in this field covers all aspects of meaning related to pragmatics and its interfaces, bringing experimental evidence to their theoretical analyses, and investigating their processing and acquisition. More specifically, there are three main strands of research within experimental pragmatics. The first regards the investigation of the different aspects of meaning and the proper carving of the space among them, as well as the proper division between semantics and pragmatics. The second related strand has to do more specifically with testing experimentally diverging, and often fine-grained, predictions of different theoretical models. The third regards more the time course and processing of pragmatic aspects of meaning, as well as their acquisition from infancy to adulthood. This article lists a selection of references to articles, book chapters, and edited collections that have contributed to making the field of experimental pragmatics what it is today. The article is organized following the first strand above, with a separate section for each of the main different aspects of meaning, and a last one on other directions and topics. The other two strands, the way experimental work in pragmatics has brought progress in testing fine-grained theoretical predictions and the investigation of processing and acquisition of pragmatic aspects of meaning, are interspersed within the different sections. The article also contains sections dedicated to edited collections and journals relevant to the field.

Theory of Mind

Current accounts of Theory of Mind development have tried to explain the results of false-belief tasks with infants and children, but failed to account for the evidence of early belief reasoning reported in the experimental pragmatics literature. This chapter reviews a number of studies on the acquisition of the mental state verb know; toddlers’ understanding of factivity (or the difference between knowing and thinking); early referential communication and toddlers’ reliance on others’ engagement as a proxy for their knowledge, and the emergence of preschoolers’ understanding of the seeing-knowing relation. The results of these studies reveal a more nuanced picture than those of false-belief tasks, with some Theory of Mind abilities emerging earlier in conversation than in laboratory tasks, while children’s epistemic theories continue to develop beyond their passing of standard Theory of Mind tasks.

Experimental Pragmatics

Experimental pragmatics is an area of cognitive science that tests hypotheses from (semantics and) pragmatics while employing rigorous methodologies from experimental psychology. Inspired by Grice’s seminal proposal, this area typically aims to uncover how sentence meaning is integrated while the listener is determining the speaker’s intended meaning. This chapter summarizes the findings with respect to three prominent experimental pragmatic topics: scalar implicature (e.g. the way some can implicitly mean some but not all); reference (e.g. how a listener goes about establishing which object among several is being referred to); and irony (which involves defining it and determining the extent to which cognitive effort and mindreading is critical to processing it). The review of each topic highlights how extralinguistic activities, such as inference-making and intention-reading, are critical to language and communication.