University of Oslo, Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, Norway.
Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, UMR 7110 CNRS-Université de Paris, France.
Cognition. 2023 Sep;238:105480. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105480. Epub 2023 May 19.
An underinformative sentence, such as Some cats are mammals, is trivially true with a semantic (some and perhaps all) reading of the quantifier and false with a pragmatic (some but not all) one, with the latter reliably resulting in longer response times than the former in a truth evaluation task (Bott & Noveck, 2004). Most analyses attribute these prolonged reaction times, or costs, to the steps associated with the derivation of the scalar implicature. In the present work we investigate, across three experiments, whether such slowdowns can be attributed (at least partly) to the participant's need to adjust to the speaker's informative intention. In Experiment 1, we designed a web-based version of Bott & Noveck's (2004) laboratory task that would most reliably provide its classic results. In Experiment 2 we found that over the course of an experimental session, participants' pragmatic responses to underinformative sentences are initially reliably long and ultimately comparable to response times of logical interpretations to the same sentences. Such results cannot readily be explained by assuming that implicature derivation is a consistent source of processing effort. In Experiment 3, we further tested our account by examining how response times change as a function of the number of people said to produce the critical utterances. When participants are introduced (via a photo and description) to a single 'speaker', the results are similar to those found in Experiment 2. However, when they are introduced to two 'speakers', with the second 'speaker' appearing midway (after five encounters with underinformative items), we found a significant uptick in pragmatic response latencies to the underinformative item right after participants' meet their second speaker (i.e. at their sixth encounter with an underinformative item). Overall, we interpret these results as suggesting that at least part of the cost typically attributed to the derivation of a scalar implicature is actually a consequence of how participants think about the informative intentions of the person producing the underinformative sentences.
一个信息量不足的句子，例如“Some cats are mammals”，在语义（一些和也许全部）解读量词时是 trivially true，但在语用（一些但非全部）解读时是假的，在后一种解读中，在真值评估任务中，反应时间比前一种解读更可靠地更长（Bott & Noveck，2004）。大多数分析将这些延长的反应时间或成本归因于推导标量含义所涉及的步骤。在本工作中，我们通过三个实验研究了这些减速是否可以归因于（至少部分归因于）参与者适应说话者的信息量意图的需要。在实验 1 中，我们设计了一个基于网络的 Bott & Noveck（2004）实验室任务的版本，该版本最可靠地提供了其经典结果。在实验 2 中，我们发现，在实验过程中，参与者对信息量不足的句子的语用反应最初是可靠的长，最终与对相同句子的逻辑解释的反应时间相当。这些结果不能简单地通过假设含义推导是处理努力的一致来源来解释。在实验 3 中，我们通过检查响应时间如何随被认为产生关键话语的人数的函数而变化，进一步测试了我们的解释。当参与者（通过照片和描述）被介绍给一个单一的“说话者”时，结果与实验 2 相似。然而，当他们被介绍给两个“说话者”，第二个“说话者”出现在中途（在遇到五个信息量不足的项目之后）时，我们发现信息量不足的项目的语用反应潜伏期在参与者遇到第二个说话者后立即显著增加（即他们第六次遇到信息量不足的项目时）。总体而言，我们将这些结果解释为表明，归因于推导标量含义的成本至少部分是参与者如何思考产生信息量不足句子的人的信息量意图的结果。
