Experimental Paradigms on Scalar Implicature Estimation

Abstract

Experimental research on the processing of Scalar Implicatures (SIs) relies on behavioral tasks that purport to measure the rate at which scalar implicatures are computed within an experimental paradigm. Two paradigms, the Truth Value Judgment Task (TVJT) (Gordon, 1998; Crain & Thornton, 2000) and the Picture Selection Task (PST) (Gerken & Shady, 1998) have dominated the experimental pragmatics literature; yet the effects of task choice on implicature rate have remained underexplored. Here we report the results of three studies testing participants in the TVJT and the PST using three different linguistic scales in English: “ad-hoc”, “or-and”, and “some-all”. In the first experiment, the task variation was manipulated within subjects while in the second experiment, it was manipulated between subjects. The third experiment examined a variant of the PST called the Hidden Card Task (HCT) which is increasingly used in the context of priming research (Bott & Chemla, 2016). We found that the estimated rate of scalar implicature computation varied noticeably between different tasks. This suggests that the experimental paradigm itself has a significant impact on our estimates of the implicature rate for a given linguistic scale, and thus, researchers studying scalar implicatures need to carefully consider the effect of experimental paradigms in experimental design and the interpretation of their results.