A subclinical study of the cognitive resources underlying scalar implicature: A focus on scalar adjectives

Book section

Recent investigations of different types of scalar implicature have reported variable strength in comprehenders’ commitment to their implicated meanings, perhaps related to the different properties each scale type has. While such discoveries threaten a unified view of scalar implicature, this paper proposes that some of this variability may arise from the different extragrammatical cognitive resources these scales draw upon as a consequent of processing their different types of representation. Providing initial evidence that cognitive resources play a role in scalar implicature, this paper reports a subclinical study of scalar implicatures triggered by scalar adjectives, examining how the functionality of an individual’s social cognition, semantic memory, and executive function affects the cancellation of implicatures compared to entailments. It reports specific effects of individuals’ functionality in social cognition and semantic memory on their judgments of implicature and entailment cancellations. The functionality of individuals’ semantic memory and executive function also affected judgment differences between antonymic scale cancellations. This evidence supports the possibility that cognitive resources influence scalar implicature, and that individual variability in these resources must be taken into account when considering the mechanisms of sentence processing.

Authors: Husband, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: UCLA Department Of Linguistics
• Host title: Connectedness. Papers by and for Sarah VanWagenen
• Volume: 18
• Pages: 189-211
• Series: UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics
• Publication date: 2014-01-01
• Language: English
• Keywords: subclinical; semantic memory; gradable adjectives; executive function; autism quotient; cancellability; scalar implicature
• Subjects: Language and languages