Distinguishing speed from accuracy in scalar implicatures
By Lewis Bott, Todd M. Bailey, Daniel Grodner. 2012
149 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Scalar implicatures are inferences that arise when a weak expression is used instead of a stronger alternative. For example, when a speaker says, “Some of the children are in the classroom,” she often implies that not all of them are. Recent processing studies of scalar implicatures have argued that generating an implicature carries a cost. In this study we investigated this cost using a sentence verification task similar to that of Bott and Noveck (2004) combined with a response deadline procedure to estimate speed and accuracy independently. Experiment 1 compared implicit upper-bound interpretations (some [but not all]) with lower-bound interpretations (some [and possibly all]). Experiment 2 compared an implicit upper-bound meaning of some with the explicit upper-bound meaning of only some. Experiment 3 compared an implicit lower-bound meaning of some with the explicit lower-bound meaning of at least some. Sentences with implicatures required additional processing time that could not be attributed to retrieval probabilities or factors relating to semantic complexity. Our results provide evidence against several different types of processing models, including verification and nonverification default implicature models and cost-free contextual models. More generally, our data are the first to provide evidence of the costs associated with deriving implicatures per se.
Subfields: Computational Theory and Mathematics, Computer Networks and Communications, Management Science and Operations Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/031050b581b40875836e6a91384137a11499a61b
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In Computational Theory and Mathematics
In Computer Networks and Communications
In Management Science and Operations Research
Citations in the corpus
- Investigating scalar implicatures in a truth-value judgement task: evidence from event-related brain potentials (2016, result): “This is an important result supporting some of the previously reported data that the pragmatic interpretation of the quantifier some involves a longer processing time relative to the semantic interpretation (Bott and Noveck, 2004; Bott et al., 2012).”
- Investigating the distribution of some (but not all ) implicatures using corpora and web-based methods (2015, background): “However, this literature relies on scalar implicature processing being comparable across different experiments, and thus, across different linguistic and discourse contexts (e.g., Bott & Noveck 2004, Bott et al. 2012, Grodner et al. 2010, Huang & Snedeker 2009).”
- An Experimental Comparison Between Presuppositions and Indirect Scalar Implicatures (2015, background): “Among the three inferences that we are looking at in this paper, direct scalar implicatures are the ones that have been studied most extensively in the psycholinguistic literature (Bott and Noveck, 2004; Bott et al., 2012; Breheny et al., 2006; Huang and Snedeker, 2009; Chemla and Bott, 2013).”