Interpreting numerals and scalar items under memory load

Abstract

A sentence such as ⿿John has four children⿿ can be interpreted as meaning either that John has at least four children (weak reading), or that John has exactly four children (strong reading). On the classical neo-Gricean view, this ambiguity is similar to the ambiguity generated by scalar terms such as ⿿some⿿, for which both a weak reading (i.e., some or all) and a strong reading (i.e., some but not all) are available. On this view, the strong reading of numerals, just like the strong reading of ⿿some⿿, is derived as a scalar implicature, taking the weak reading as semantically given. However, more recent studies have found substantial differences between the two phenomena. For instance, the syntactic distribution of the strong reading is not the same in both cases, and young children's performance in certain specific tasks has suggested that they acquire the strong reading of numerals before they acquire the strong reading of standard scalar items. Using a dual task approach, we provide evidence for another type of difference between numerals and standard scalar items. We show that tapping memory resources has opposite effects on bare numerals and on ⿿some⿿. Under high cognitive load, participants report fewer implicatures for sentences involving ⿿some⿿ (compared to low cognitive load conditions), but they report more strong readings for sentences involving bare numerals. We discuss the implications of this result for current theoretical debates regarding the semantics and pragmatics of numerals.