{"pk":29570,"title":"Probability and processing speed of scalar inferences is context-dependent","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Studies addressing the question of whether scalar inferencesgenerally incur a processing cost have yielded conflicting re-sults. Constraint-based accounts, which seek to unify theseconflicting results, make a prediction which we test here: theprobability of an interpretation and the speed with which it isprocessed depends on the contextual support it receives. Wemanipulated contextual support for the scalar inference in twotruth-value judgment experiments by manipulating a lexicalfeature (presence of partitive “of the”) and a pragmatic fea-ture (the implicit Question Under Discussion). Participants’responder type – whether their majority response was prag-matic (reflecting the inference) or literal (reflecting its absence)– was the main predictor of response times: pragmatic re-sponses were faster than literal responses when generated bypragmatic responders; the reverse was true for literal respon-ders. We interpret this as further evidence against costly infer-ence accounts and in support of constraint-based accounts ofpragmatic processing.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"psycholinguistics; experimental pragmatics;scalar inference; Question Under Discussion"}],"section":"Poster Session 1","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3rt8763c","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Leyla","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kursat","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Judith","middle_name":"","last_name":"Degen","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29570/galley/19430/download/"}]}