Hostname: page-component-76d6cb85b7-hqrjx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-07-13T07:14:21.185Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The verbatim access effect: implicature in experimental context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2018

MUFFY SIEGEL Open the ORCID record for MUFFY SIEGEL [Opens in a new window] ,
JÉRÉMY ZEHR ,
HEZEKIAH AKIVA BACOVCIN ,
LYNNE STEUERLE SCHOFIELD  and
FLORIAN SCHWARZ
MUFFY SIEGEL*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
JÉRÉMY ZEHR
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
HEZEKIAH AKIVA BACOVCIN
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
LYNNE STEUERLE SCHOFIELD
Affiliation:
Swarthmore College
FLORIAN SCHWARZ
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
*
†Address for correspondence: Muffy Siegel, Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, 3401-C Walnut St., suite 300, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228. e-mail: muffy.siegel@temple.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Implicature interpretation is sensitive to many contextual factors. This experimental study investigates two:

  1. (A) instructions to think carefully about exactly what is said

  2. (B) access to the verbatim form of what has been said

Participants encountered (1) below, which can give rise to the contradictory relevance implicature in (2), as feedback during a decoy task:

  1. (1) I’m not suggesting that you’re responding too slowly, but it’s important to give the first response that comes to mind.

  2. (2) (I am suggesting that) you’re responding too slowly.

When participants were questioned post-task, (B) significantly reduced rates of agreement that the speaker of (1) had said (2), whether the verbatim form provided was written (Experiment 1) or audio (Experiment 2). (A) had no such effect. In Experiment 3, we added a final task for participants: to recall (1) verbatim. One-third had forgotten it, typically substituting the implicature (2). We argue that this memory loss can explain the lower implicature rates associated with verbatim access: verbatim access reminds forgetful participants of (1)’s compositional interpretation, and that interpretation is inconsistent with the implicature in (2). Consequently, verbatim access reduces the chances of endorsing (2), thus introducing an inherent literal meaning bias in interpreting previous conversation.

Keywords

implicaturepragmaticssemanticscontextverbatim memory

Information

Type
Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , December 2018 , pp. 595 - 625
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

*

We gratefully acknowledge NSF grant BCS-1349009 to Florian Schwarz for support of this research. We are also grateful for helpful discussions with Joe Bowring, Alice Hausman, Jeff Kaplan, Mandy Simons, Rob Wilder, and the participants in Florian Schwarz’s lab seminar. We thank Meaning in Flux (2016) audience members, especially Lyn Frazier and Adele Goldberg, for their incisive questions and invaluable recommendations. Any remaining errors are our own.

References

references

Barner, D., Brooks, N. & Bale, A. (2011). Accessing the unsaid: the role of scalar alternatives in children’s pragmatic inferences. Cognition 188, 87–96.Google Scholar
Bill, C., Romoli, J., Schwarz, F. & Crain, S. (2016). Scalar implicatures versus presuppositions: the view from acquisition. Topoi 35, 57–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bonnefon, J.-F., Feeney, A. & Villejoubert, G. (2009). When some is actually all: scalar inferences in face-threatening contexts, Cognition 112, 249–258.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bott, L. & Noveck, I. A. (2004). Some utterances are underinformative: the onset and time course of scalar inferences. Journal of Memory and Language 51, 437–457.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, H. H. (1979). Responding to indirect speech acts. Cognitive Psychology 11, 430–477.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Degen, J. (2015). Investigating the distribution of some (but not all) implicatures using corpora and web-based methods. Semantics and Pragmatics 8, 1–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Degen, J. & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2015). Availability of alternatives and the processing of scalar implicatures: a visual world eye-tracking study. Cognitive Science 40 , 172–201.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Doran, R., Ward, G., Larson, M., McNabb, Y. & Baker, R. E. (2012). A novel experimental paradigm for distinguishing between what is said and what is implicated. Language 88(1), 124–154.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feeney, A., Scrafton, S., Duckworth, A. & Handley, S. J. (2004). The story of some: everyday pragmatic inference by children and adults. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 58(2), 121–132.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gibbs, R. W. (1981). Memory for requests in conversation. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 20, 630–640.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In Cole, P. & Morgan, J. L. (eds.), Syntax and Semantics vol. 3: Speech Acts (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Grodner, D., Kim, M. & Russell, B. (2016, May). A Bayesian account of conversational implicature. Paper presented at a meeting of Common Ground Colloquium, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Grodner, D. & Sedivy, J. C. (2011). The effect of speaker-specific information on pragmatic inferences. In Gibson, E. and Pearlmutter, N. J. (eds.), The processing and acquisition of reference (pp. 239–272). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guasti, M. T., Chierchia, G., Crane, S., Foppolo, F., Gualmini, A. & Meroni, L. (2005). Why children and adults sometimes (but not always) compute implicatures. Language and Cognitive Processes 20(5), 667–696.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gurevich, O., Johnson, M. & Goldberg, A. (2010). Incidental verbatim memory for language. Language and Cognition 2(1), 45–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horn, L. R. (1984). Toward a new taxonomy of pragmatic inference: Q- and R-based implicature. In Shiffrin, D. (ed.), Meaning, form, and use in context (pp. 11–42). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Horton, W. S., Schmader, C. & Ward, G. (2016). On the incorporation of generalized conversational implicatures into what is said: an experimental investigation. Poster presented at the meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Huang, Y. T. & Snedeker, J. (2018). Some inferences still take time: prosody, predictability, and the speed of scalar implicatures. Cognitive Psychology 102, 105–126.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Katsos, N. & Bishop, D. V. M. (2011). Pragmatic tolerance: implications for the acquisition of informativeness and implicature. Cognition 120(1), 67–81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Keenan, J. M., MacWhinney, B. & Mayhew, D. (1977). Pragmatics in memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 16, 549–560.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levinson, S. C. (2000). Presumptive meanings: the theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mazzarella, D. (2015). Politeness, relevance and scalar inferences. Journal of Pragmatics 79, 93–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murphy, G. L. & Shapiro, A. M. (1994). Forgetting of verbatim information in discourse. Memory and Cognition 22, 85–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Noveck, I. A. (2001). When children are more logical than adults: experimental investigations of scalar implicatures. Cognition 80, 253–282.Google Scholar
Papafragou, A. & Musolino, J. (2003). Scalar implicatures: experiments at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Cognition 86, 253–282.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Papafragou, A. & Tantalou, N. (2004). Children’s computation of implicatures. Language Acquisition. 12(1), 71–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prince, E. F. (1990). On the use of social conversation as evidence in a court of law. In Levi, J. N. & Walker, A. G. (eds.), Language in the judicial process: Vol. 5 (pp. 279–289). Berlin: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, C. (2017). Linguistic convention and the architecture of interpretation. Analytic Philosophy 58(4), 418–439.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sachs, J. S. (1967). Recognition memory for syntactic and semantic aspects of connected discourse. Perception and Psychophysics 2(9), 437–442.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sachs, J. S. (1974). Memory in reading and listening to discourse. Memory and Cognition 2(4), 95–100.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sauerland, U. (2004). Scalar implicatures in complex sentences. Linguistics and Philosophy 27(3), 267–291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siegel, M. (2005). Finding conversational facts: a role for linguistics in court. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 12(2), 255–278.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sikos, L., Kim, M., Anchiraico, R., Lam, H. & Grodner, D. J. (2016). Speaker likeability leads to utterance acceptability: social context modulates tolerance for pragmatic violations in adults. Poster presented at the meeting of the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, Gainesville, FL.Google Scholar
Smith, C. L. (1980). Quantifier and question answering in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 30, 191–205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1995 [1986]). Relevance: communication and cognition (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
van Tiel, B., van Miltenburg, E., Zevakhin, N. & Geurts, B. (2014). Scalar diversity. Journal of Semantics 33(1), 137–175.Google Scholar
Wilder, R. (2016). Examining episodic information in speech perception (Unpublished doctoral dissertation proposal). University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.Google Scholar