L’impact de l’apprentissage d’une langue seconde sur les capacités pragmatiques : le cas des implicatures scalaires

Abstract

There is a vast amount of studies on some forms of implicit communication such as scalar implicatures by monolingual speakers, but few studies have been carried out on the pragmatic capacities of second language learners. The only available data have been collected in Slabakova (2010). This study has shown that L2 learners are more pragmatic than L1 speakers by interpreting a scalar term in their L2. However the replicability of the results has been called into question because of methodological issues and conclusions ignoring empirical data on cognitive processing of scalar implicatures. We therefore used the same experimental material as Slabakova (2010) but improved the methodology and asked two groups of L2 French learners to make a sentence verification task. After a short context, they had to judge an underinformative sentence based on the scalar terms , ( ). The L2 learners have been tested in their two languages and compared to a sample of French monolinguals. The results of Slabakova (2010) have been replicated since the L2 learners make more inferences in French as monolinguals do. Our results also show that the L2 learners more often derive implicatures in their L1 than monolinguals in the same L1. This suggests that learning a second language has an impact on the way to communicate not only in the L2 but also in the L1.