The Neural Computation of Scalar Implicature.
Language comprehension involves not only constructing the literal meaning of a sentence but also going beyond the literal meaning to infer what was meant but not said. One widely-studied test case is scalar implicature: The inference that, e.g.,Sally ate some of the cookiesimplies she did not eat all of them. Research is mixed on whether this is due to a rote, grammaticalized procedure or instead a complex, contextualized inference. We find that in sentences like If Sally ate some of the cookies, then the rest are on the counter, thatthe resttriggers a late, sustained positivity relative to Sally ate some of the cookies, and the rest are on the counter. This is consistent with behavioral results and linguistic theory suggesting that the former sentence does not trigger a scalar implicature. This motivates a view on which scalar implicature is contextualized but dependent on grammatical structure.
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA.
Joshua K
JK
Hartshorne
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland St., Cambridge, MA 02138 USA, snedeker@wjh.harvard.edu.
Jesse
J
Snedeker
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland St., Cambridge, MA 02138 USA.
Stephanie Yen-Mun Liem
SY
Azar
Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado-Boulder, 594 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309 USA, albert.kim@colorado.edu.
Albert E
AE
Kim