In the present study we introduce dual task methodology to test opposing psychological processing predictions concerning the nature of implicatures in pragmatic theories. Implicatures routinely arise in human communication when hearers interpret utterances pragmatically and go beyond the logical meaning of the terms. The neo-Gricean view (e.g., Levinson, 2000) assumes that implicatures are gene...

We have developed two systems, FN and ANDD, that use natural language and graphical displays, respectively, to communicate information about objects to human users. Both systems must deal with the fundamental problem of ensuring that their output does not carry unwanted and inappropriate conversational implicatures. We describe the types of conversational implicatures that FN and ANDD can avoid...

Scalar implicatures have been a subject of much debate concerning their place as part of either the grammatical computation of the semantics of a sentence or as post-compositional pragmatic reasoning. This paper describes three experiments addressing the semantic/pragmatic question of scalar implicatures from a developmental perspective, one in English and two in American Sign Language (ASL). T...

I've known about conversational implicature a lot longer than I've known Larry. In 1967 I read Grice's " Logical and Conversation " in mimeograph, shortly after his William James lectures, and I read its precursor " (Implication), " section III of " The Causal Theory of Perception " , well before that. And I've thought, read, and written about implicature off and on ever since. Nevertheless, I ...

We investigate the effects of alternative utterances on pragmatic interpretation of language. We focus on two specific cases: specificity implicatures (less specific utterances imply the negation of more specific utterances) and Horn implicatures (more complex utterances are assigned to less likely meanings). We present models of these phenomena in terms of recursive social reasoning. Our most ...

particular, scalar implicatures are at the heart of a very vigorous current debate about the structure of the interpretative process. However, even if one is convinced that there are conversational implicatures of the standard Gricean sort, one might not be convinced that these two cases are best explained in Gricean terms. The enriched interpretation of coordination, for example, might seem be...

In this paper, we discuss dependencies between rhetorical discourse structure and relevance implicatures. We follow [3] and infer relevance implicatures from the assumption that an answer provides optimal information for solving an explicitly or implicitly given decision problem of the inquirer. Such a decision problem can be identified with a question raised in the conversation. Background que...

Pragmatic implicatures—inferences that weak statements imply that stronger ones could not be used—are a popular case study of children’s pragmatic development. A growing literature suggests that children make implicatures under certain conditions, but their performance varies widely across tasks, and few datasets allow direct comparisons between implicature types. We designed a simple paradigm ...