Preston Ruh, “Cognitive Control and Context Sensitivity in Scalar Implicature Derivation”
Mentor: Glenn Starr, Linguistics, Letters & Science (College of)
Poster #136
Scalar implicatures (SIs) with the quantifier some have been extensively researched to explore how pragmatic meanings are computed. For instance, the phrase “I found some books” is semantically understood to mean at least one book was located (i.e., I found at least one of the books), yet it is frequently interpreted with an implicature that not every book was found (i.e., I found some but not all books). The implicature meaning is thought to be more likely when it helps answer a relevant question under discussion (QUD), such as when responding to “Did you find all the books?” (which contains all, a scalemate of some) rather than “Did you find any books?”. This study investigates how the QUD affects the likelihood of pragmatic implicature derivation by asking participants to judge the probability that some means all in the context of a short passage. Additionally, previous research has emphasized that cognitive factors influence context-sensitive interpretations of some. We examine whether context maintenance ability (CMA) predicts sensitivity to these contrasting meanings. Participants’ CMA is measured through an AX-continuous performance (AX-CPT) task. In it, patterns appear sequentially as cue-probe pairs, requiring participants to respond to an X (the probe) only if it follows an A (the cue), while making a non-target response in all other cases. Success depends on effectively activating and updating context information for each trial. We predict that CMA plays a determining role in modulating sensitivity to QUD in relation to the interpretation of scalar some.