School of Psychology, Cardiff University, United Kingdom.
School of Psychology, Cardiff University, United Kingdom.
Cognition. 2018 Jul;176:1-14. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.02.024. Epub 2018 Mar 20.
Comprehension can be enriched by considering what a speaker could have said but did not; namely, the alternative. For example, "Betty passed some of her exams" can be interpreted as "Betty passed some but not all of her exams". This enriched interpretation is an example of a scalar implicature. We consider whether the salience and use of the alternative are independent processes in the derivation of scalar implicatures or whether use is dependent on salience. Participants completed three sentence interpretation experiments in which the sentences invited scalar implicatures. The experiments used a structural priming paradigm with alternatives and implicatures as primes. We found that (1) adults could be primed to derive scalar implicatures when the alternative was the prime (2) they did so at a rate equal to if the scalar implicature itself were the prime. In the absence of evidence that the use of the alternative can be primed independently of its salience, we conclude that salience and use are not independent processes. Instead, we suggest that when the alternative is sufficiently salient, the implicature will automatically be derived.
理解可以通过考虑说话者本可以说什么但没有说的内容来丰富；也就是说，考虑备选内容。例如，“贝蒂通过了一些考试”可以被解释为“贝蒂通过了一些但不是所有的考试”。这种丰富的解释是标量蕴含的一个例子。我们考虑备选内容的凸显度和使用是否是标量蕴含推导过程中的独立过程，或者使用是否依赖于凸显度。参与者完成了三个句子解释实验，其中的句子邀请了标量蕴含。这些实验使用了具有备选内容和蕴含的结构启动范式。我们发现：（1）当备选内容是启动内容时，成年人可以被启动来推导标量蕴含；（2）他们这样做的速度与标量蕴含本身作为启动内容时的速度相等。在没有证据表明备选内容的使用可以独立于其凸显度被启动的情况下，我们得出结论，凸显度和使用不是独立的过程。相反，我们认为，当备选内容足够凸显时，蕴含将自动推导出来。
