Marty Paul, Romoli Jacopo, Sudo Yasutada, Breheny Richard
L-Università ta' Malta, Malta.
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany.
Cognition. 2024 Mar;244:105667. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105667. Epub 2024 Jan 4.
Recent experimental research has observed two kinds of priming effects on quantity implicatures. One is the Strong-Weak contrast, where more quantity implicatures are observed after prime trials forcing interpretations with quantity implicatures ('Strong primes') than after prime trials forcing interpretations without quantity implicatures ('Weak primes'). The other effect is the Alternative-Weak contrast, where prime trials mentioning alternative expressions ('Alternative primes') similarly lead to more quantity implicatures. It has been claimed that both of these effects should be understood in terms of increased salience of alternative expressions used to compute quantity implicatures. We present experimental evidence that speaks against this hypothesis. With the help of novel baseline conditions, which were absent in previous studies on implicature priming, we observe that the results in the priming paradigm commonly used in the literature are inverse preference effects in the sense that robust priming effects are observed towards interpretations that are normally unexpected, and depending on the baseline expectation, each of the three prime types mentioned above may have priming effects. We furthermore investigated different types of alternative priming for so-called ad hoc implicatures and found that for these implicatures, presenting an alternative expression in a simple sentence does not have a priming effect on the implicature of a similarly simple sentence, but presenting it in a more complex conjunctive construction does. Our results also show that conjunctions of similar but irrelevant expressions have a similarly robust priming effect and that conjunctive sentences with two conjuncts do not give rise to priming effects on the interpretation of sentences of the same syntactic complexity, but those with three conjuncts do. To make sense of these observations, we propose that what crucially matters for priming implicatures is incremental change in one's probabilistic expectations about the current conversational context brought about by a process we call context adaptation.
最近的实验研究观察到了两种对数量含义的启动效应。一种是强弱对比，即与迫使进行无数量含义解释的启动试验（“弱启动”）相比，在迫使进行数量含义解释的启动试验（“强启动”）之后，观察到更多的数量含义。另一种效应是替代-弱对比，即提及替代表达的启动试验（“替代启动”）同样会导致更多的数量含义。有人认为，这两种效应都应从用于计算数量含义的替代表达的显著性增加的角度来理解。我们提供了与这一假设相悖的实验证据。借助于先前关于含义启动的研究中所没有的新颖基线条件，我们观察到，文献中常用的启动范式的结果是反向偏好效应，即朝着通常意想不到的解释观察到稳健的启动效应，并且根据基线预期，上述三种启动类型中的每一种都可能产生启动效应。我们还研究了所谓临时含义的不同类型的替代启动，发现对于这些含义，在简单句子中呈现替代表达对同样简单句子的含义没有启动效应，但在更复杂的连词结构中呈现则有。我们的结果还表明，相似但不相关表达的连词具有同样稳健的启动效应，并且具有两个连词的连词句子对相同句法复杂性句子的解释不会产生启动效应，但具有三个连词的则会。为了理解这些观察结果，我们提出，对含义启动至关重要的是由我们称为语境适应的过程所带来的对当前会话语境概率预期的增量变化。
