Abstract
Scalar implicatures, the phenomena where a sentence like “The pianist played some Mozart sonatas” is interpreted, as “The pianist did not play all Mozart sonatas” have been given two different analyses. Neo-Griceans (NG) claim that this interpretation is based on lexical scales (e.g., <some, all>), where the stronger term (e.g., all) implies the weaker term (e.g., some), but the weaker term (e.g., some) implicates the negation of the stronger term (i.e., some = not all). Post-Griceans (PG) deny that this is the case and offer a context-based inferential account for scalar implicatures. While scalar implicatures have been extensively investigated, with results apparently in favor of PG accounts, the psychological reality of lexical scales has not been put to the test. This is what we have done in the present experiment, with a lexical decision task using lexical scales in a masked priming paradigm. While PG accounts do not attribute any role for lexical scales in the computation of scalar implicatures, NG accounts suggest that lexical scales are the core mechanism behind the computation of scalar implicatures, and predict that weaker terms in a scale should prime stronger terms more than the reverse because stronger words are necessary to the interpretation of weaker words, while stronger words can be interpreted independently of weaker words. Our results provided evidence in favor of the psychological existence of scales, leading to the first clear experimental support for the NG account.
Highlights
The notion of implicature was introduced by Grice (1975) to account for information that was communicated without being, strictly speaking, said by the speaker, in other words, for information that was implicitly rather than explicitly communicated (Grice, 1989)
Grice distinguished among conversational implicatures those that strongly depend on the context from those that depend on the words used
The prime is presented subliminally, that is, too quickly for the participant to be aware that it was presented. These priming paradigms with a simple lexical decision task give us a good opportunity to test the psychological reality of scales
Summary
The notion of implicature was introduced by Grice (1975) to account for information that was communicated without being, strictly speaking, said by the speaker, in other words, for information that was implicitly rather than explicitly communicated (Grice, 1989). Given that PG does not give lexical scales any role in the construction of the ad hoc concepts that it sees as the core of scalars, at most it would predict that, as any set of semantically related words, words inside a scale would prime one another more strongly than they would prime other words It would not predict any asymmetry in the strength of priming between weaker and stronger words. These priming paradigms with a simple lexical decision task (where participants have to decide whether the target is a word or a non-word, after they have been presented with another word subliminally) give us a good opportunity to test the psychological reality of scales This is a simple experimental paradigm that does not depend on any kind of reasoning and that is largely automatic given that the prime is not consciously perceived (Dehaene et al, 1998). The NG account (which supposes the psychological reality of scales) predicts that the target should be evaluated faster in the implicature condition (e.g., SOME – all) than in the implication condition (e.g., ALL – some)
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