What second-language speakers can tell us about pragmatic processing.

Ahmed Khorsheed,Sabariah Md Rashid,Camilo R Ronderos,Vahid Nimehchisalem,Lee Geok Imm,Jessica Price,Claudia Felser

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0263724

Ahmed Khorsheed, Sabariah Md Rashid + Show 5 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263724

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Abstract

Upon hearing the phrase Some cats meow, a listener might pragmatically infer that ‘Some but not all cats meow’. This is known as a scalar implicature and it often arises when a speaker produces a weak linguistic expression instead of a stronger one. Several L2 studies claim that pragmatic inferences are generated by default and their comprehension presents no challenges to L2 learners. However, the evidence obtained from these studies largely stems from offline-based tasks that provide limited information about how scalar implicatures are processed. This study investigated scalar implicature processing among L2 speakers of English and the degree to which differences in L2 proficiency and Theory of Mind abilities would modulate pragmatic responding. The experiment used an online sentence verification paradigm that required participants to judge, among multiple control items, the veracity of under-informative sentences, such as Some cats are mammals, and to respond as quickly as possible. A true response to this item is indicative of a logical some and perhaps all reading and a false response to a pragmatic some but not all reading. Our results showed evidence that scalar inferences are not generated by default. The answer linked to the pragmatic reading some but not all took significantly longer to make relative to the answer that relies on the logical interpretation some and perhaps all. This processing slowdown was also significantly larger among participants with lower English proficiency. Further exploratory analyses of participants’ Theory of Mind, as measured by the Social Skill subscale in the Autism Spectrum Quotient, revealed that socially inclined participants are more likely than the socially disinclined to derive a scalar inference. These results together provide new empirical insights into how L2 learners process scalar implicatures and thus implications for processing theories in experimental pragmatics and second language acquisition.

Highlights

Paul Grice [1] proposed that human communication involves more than the mere encoding and decoding of messages
These previous reports show that the empirical landscape on how bilinguals compute scalar inferences remains less clear in the literature, whether the superior pragmatic ability among L2 individuals was due to the automatic processes involved in generating the implicature, to a bilingualism advantage, to linguistic proficiency, or to a methodological bias as the evidence supporting previous claims comes almost exclusively from offlinebased tasks
Previous studies on scalar implicatures in L2 context suggest that pragmatic inferences are generated by default and their comprehension presents no challenges to L2 learners regardless of proficiency level (e.g., [42, 45,46,47])

Summary

Introduction

Paul Grice [1] proposed that human communication involves more than the mere encoding and decoding of messages. Recent experimental investigations on the role of ToM in determining pragmatic behavior show that participants’ variable performance in comprehending scalar inferences is largely correlated with participant’s social skills or mindreading abilities (e.g., [17, 25, 37]) Those with inferior ToM abilities tend to be more literal in interpreting under-informative sentences than those with strong ToM abilities, in both irony [37] and scalar implicatures [29, 38]. Antoniou and Katsos [56] suggested that implicature understanding is a “pragmatic–communicative skill that largely depends on children’s language abilities.” All in all, these previous reports show that the empirical landscape on how bilinguals compute scalar inferences remains less clear in the literature, whether the superior pragmatic ability among L2 individuals was due to the automatic processes involved in generating the implicature, to a bilingualism advantage, to linguistic proficiency, or to a methodological bias as the evidence supporting previous claims comes almost exclusively from offlinebased tasks. The study investigates, on an exploratory basis, the degree to which ToM reasoning abilities interact with implicature derivation and proficiency level, in relation to the matter discussed in the previous section

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