Pragmatic enrichment in language processing and development

The goal of language comprehension for humans is not just to decode the semantic content of sentences, but rather to grasp what speakers intend to communicate. To infer speaker meaning, listeners must at minimum assess whether and how the literal meaning of an utterance addresses a question under discussion in the conversation. In cases of implicature, where the speaker intends to communicate more than just the literal meaning, listeners must access additional relevant information in order to understand the intended contribution of the utterance. I argue that the primary challenge for inferring speaker meaning is in identifying and accessing this relevant contextual information. In this dissertation, I integrate evidence from several different types of implicature to argue that both adults and children are able to execute complex pragmatic inferences relatively efficiently, but encounter some difficulty finding what is relevant in context. I argue that the variability observed in processing costs associated with adults' computation of scalar implicatures can be better understood by examining how the critical contextual information is presented in the discourse context. I show that children's oft-cited hyper-literal interpretation style is limited to scalar quantifiers. Even 3-year-olds are adept at understanding indirect requests and "parenthetical" readings of belief reports. Their ability to infer speaker meanings is limited only by their relative inexperience in conversation and lack of world knowledge

Online processing of scalar implicatures in Chinese as revealed by event-related potentials

During sentence processing, whether pragmatic information is integrated immediately and automatically or at a delay is a subject of debate in experimental pragmatics. One test case is that of scalar implicatures, which occur in statements like "some of the students are hardworking", which have both a logical meaning ("at least one is hardworking") and a pragmatic meaning ("not all of them are hardworking"). Default processing accounts hold that the pragmatic meaning of some comes online immediately and effortlessly, whereas context-based processing accounts propose that this meaning is not generated until after the logical meaning. Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies on scalar implicatures typically investigated critical words downstream of the quantifier and were thus not able to address the possibility of immediate construction of scalar interpretations at the moment the quantifier is encountered. Furthermore, effects of lexico-semantic processing and real-world context make it difficult to interpret effects observed in these studies. The present study adopts a picture-sentence design to make the violation immediately detectable when the quantifier is read and to control the context in which the sentence is understood. Participants saw pictures in which several characters are either performing the same activity or different activities, followed by sentences using "some" or "all", yielding a 2x2 design including both pragmatic violations ("some" sentences after "all" pictures) with matched controls, and purely incorrect assertions ("all" sentences after "some" pictures) with matched controls. Crucially, the pragmatic violation cannot be recognized as a violation until after the pragmatic meaning of some is computed. Pragmatic violations and purely logic violations elicited an early N400 effect and a right-lateralized negativity in the 600-900 ms time window, whereas purely logic violations elicited qualitatively different effects in at least the late time window. These results demonstrate that the pragmatic meaning of some, which relies on the generation of a scalar implicature, is available to the processor immediately; furthermore, they show that errors based on pragmatic expectations and errors based purely on logic elicit qualitatively different electrophysiological responses. I conclude that these findings are consistent with a default processing account, although they do not rule out a context-driven account

Informationally redundant utterances elicit pragmatic inferences

Most theories of pragmatics and language processing predict that speakers avoid excessive informational redundancy. Informationally redundant utterances are, however, quite common in natural dialogue. From a comprehension standpoint, it remains unclear how comprehenders interpret these utterances, and whether they make attempts to reconcile the ‘dips’ in informational utility with expectations of ‘appropriate’ or ‘rational’ speaker informativity. We show that informationally redundant (overinformative) utterances can trigger pragmatic inferences that increase utterance utility in line with comprehender expectations. In a series of three studies, we look at utterances which refer to stereotyped event sequences describing common activities (scripts). When comprehenders encounter utterances describing events that can be easily inferred from prior context, they interpret them as signifying that the event conveys new, unstated information (i.e. an event otherwise assumed to be habitual, such as paying the cashier when shopping, is reinterpreted as non-habitual). We call these inferences atypicality inferences. Further, we show that the degree to which these atypicality inferences are triggered depends on the framing of the utterance. In the absence of an exclamation mark or a discourse marker indicating the speaker's specific intent to communicate the given information, such inferences are far less likely to arise. Overall, the results demonstrate that excessive conceptual redundancy leads to comprehenders revising the conversational common ground, in an effort to accommodate unexpected dips in informational utility

A closer look at the sources of variability in scalar implicature derivation: a review

For more than 20 years, studies in experimental pragmatics have provided invaluable insights into the cognitive processes involved in deriving scalar implicatures and achieving inferential comprehension. However, the reports have always contained a notable degree of variability that remained inadequately discussed in the literature. For instance, upon closer inspection of the experimental record, one can always find a group of individuals who tend to be largely pragmatic, overwhelmingly logical, or sometimes mixed not showing a clear preference. There also exist newly-devised paradigms that prompt a radically different type of response than other paradigms, and thus new evidence casting doubt on long-established findings in the field. More recent research on scalar diversity further suggests that differences in the semantic structure of scalar words can lead to differing rates of scalar implicatures and can modulate the time invested in pragmatic processing. Indeed, one can contend that the current empirical landscape on scalar implicatures can be characterized as having three primary sources of variability: inter-individual, methodological, and linguistic. What factor or factors are behind these patterns of variability, and how can we interpret them in light of a pragmatic theory? This paper has a 2-fold objective: one is to review the previous experimental record on scalar implicatures from variability-based lenses, and the other to discuss the factor(s) that could account for this observed variability in the literature. Avenues for future research are provided

Psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic investigations of scalar implicature

The present study examines the representation and composition of meaning in scalar implicatures. Scalar implicature is the phenomenon whereby the use of a less informative term (e.g., some) is inferred to mean the negation of a more informative term (e.g., to mean not all). The experiments reported here investigate how the processing of the implicature-based aspect of meaning (e.g., the interpretation of some as meaning not all) differs from other types of meaning processing, and how that aspect of meaning is initially realized. The first three experiments measure event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine whether inferential pragmatic aspects of meaning are processed using different mechanisms than lexical or combinatorial semantic aspects of meaning, and whether inferential aspects of meaning can be realized rapidly. Participants read infelicitous quantifiers for which the semantic meaning (at least one of) was correct with respect to the context but the pragmatic meaning (not all of) was not, compared to quantifiers for which the semantic meaning was inconsistent with the context and no additional pragmatic meaning is available. Across experiments, quantifiers that were pragmatically inconsistent but not semantically inconsistent with the context elicited a broadly distributed, sustained negative component. This sustained negativity contrasts with the N400 effect typically elicited by nouns that are incongruent with their context, suggesting that the recognition of scalar implicature errors elicits a qualitatively different ERP signature than the recognition of lexico-semantic errors. The effect was also distinct from the ERP response elicited by quantifiers that were semantically inconsistent with a context. The sustained negativity may reflect cancellation of the pragmatic inference and retrieval of the semantic meaning. This process was also found to be independent from lexico-semantic processing: the N400 elicited by lexico-semantic violations was not modulated by the presence of a pragmatic inconsistency. These findings suggest there is a dissociation between the mechanisms for processing combinatorial semantic meaning and those for inference-based pragmatic meaning, that inferential pragmatic meaning can be realized rapidly, and that the computation of meaning involves continuous negotiation between different aspects of meaning. The next set of experiments examined how scalar implicature-based meanings are realized initially. Default processing accounts assume that the interpretation of some of as meaning not all of is realized easily and automatically (regardless of context), whereas context-driven processing accounts assume that it is realized effortfully and only in certain contexts. In two experiments, participants' self-paced reading times were recorded as they read vignettes in which the context did or did not bias the participants to make a scalar inference (to interpret some of as meaning not all of). The reading times in the first experiment suggested that the realization of the inference was influenced by the context: reading times to a target word later in the vignette were facilitated in contexts in which the scalar inference should be realized but not in contexts where it should not be realized. Importantly, however, reading times did not provide evidence for processing cost at the time the inference is realized, contrary to the predictions of context-driven processing accounts. The results raise the question of why inferencing occurs only in certain contexts if it does not involve extra processing effort. In the subsequent experiment, reading times suggested that the inference may not have been realized when participants engaged in a secondary task that increased processing load. These results, together with the results of other recent experiments, suggest that inferencing may be effortless in certain contexts but effortful with other contexts, and not computed at all in still other contexts, depending on the strength of the bias created by the context. These findings may all be accountable for under a recently-proposed constraint-based processing model of scalar implicature

Processing cost effects of atypicality inferences in a dual-task setup

Whether pragmatic inferences are cognitively more effortful than processing literal language has been a longstanding question in pragmatics. So far, experimental studies have exclusively tested generalized (scalar) implicatures. Current theories would predict that particularized implicatures should be cognitively effortful e however, this prediction has to date not been tested empirically. The present article contributes to the debate by investigating a specific type of particularized implicature, atypicality inferences, in a dualtask paradigm. In three experiments, we used either a non-linguistic (Experiment 1) or a linguistic (Experiments 2 and 3) secondary task, to modulate the amount of available cognitive resources. Our results show that the strength of pragmatic inferences is largely unaffected by the secondary task, which contrasts with prior predictions. We discuss the implications for traditional and modern accounts of pragmatic processing