Abstract
How quickly do children and adults interpret scalar lexical items in speech processing? The current study examined interpretation of the scalar terms some vs. all in contexts where either the stronger (some = not all) or the weaker interpretation was permissible (some allows all). Children and adults showed increased negative deflections in brain activity following the word some in some-infelicitous versus some-felicitous contexts. This effect was found as early as 100 ms across central electrode sites (in children), and 300–500 ms across left frontal, fronto-central, and centro-parietal electrode sites (in children and adults). These results strongly suggest that young children (aged between 3 and 4 years) as well as adults quickly have access to the contextually appropriate interpretation of scalar terms.
Highlights
While communicating, interlocutors often derive additional interpretations from utterances that are not directly encoded in the semantics of the words they use
The event-related potential (ERP) measured at the onset of the quantifier all suggested an early but sustained positivity in the some-felicitous conditions compared to the some-infelicitous ones
We found a significant difference in brain activity to some-felicitous versus infelicitous trials, with ERPs being more negative in some-infelicitous trials across left frontal electrode sites, t(24) = 2.22, p = 0.036
Summary
Interlocutors often derive additional interpretations from utterances that are not directly encoded in the semantics of the words they use. Such interpretations are obtained by performing additional semantic/pragmatic operations to the lexical meaning of these words and the way they cohere at the sentence level. Pragmatic inferencing, as this phenomenon is called, is pervasive in language use. The most studied case of pragmatic inferencing, potentially due to the systematicity and robustness of this class of pragmatic inferences, is that of scalar implicatures. Let us consider the exchange presented in (1) below:
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