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Related Experiment Video

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Using Eye Movements Recorded in the Visual World Paradigm to Explore the Online Processing of Spoken Language

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Processing inferences at the semantics/pragmatics frontier: disjunctions and free choice.

Emmanuel Chemla¹, Lewis Bott²

¹LSCP, EHESS, ENS, CNRS, France.

|January 7, 2014

Summary

Free choice permission, where disjunctive sentences imply multiple options are allowed, differs from scalar implicatures. Processing studies reveal distinct cognitive mechanisms for these linguistic inferences.

Keywords:

Free choice Inferences Pragmatics Processing Scalar implicatures

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Published on: May 9, 2019

Area of Science:

Linguistics
Psycholinguistics
Cognitive Science

Background:

Linguistic inferences like entailments, implicatures, and presuppositions are traditionally categorized using introspective judgments.
Recent research explores the processing costs associated with these inferences, such as scalar implicatures.
Free choice permission, a phenomenon where disjunctive sentences yield conjunctive interpretations (e.g., permission for multiple options), has been a subject of theoretical debate.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the processing properties of free choice permission.
To empirically compare free choice permission with scalar implicatures.
To determine if free choice inferences are computationally distinct from scalar implicatures.

Main Methods:

Conducted four psycholinguistic processing studies.
Utilized methods likely involving reading times or event-related potentials (ERPs) to measure processing effort.
Focused on sentences exhibiting free choice permission and scalar implicature phenomena.

Main Results:

Processing data indicates that free choice inferences are not computationally equivalent to scalar implicatures.
The findings challenge theoretical arguments suggesting a unified account for these inference types.
Empirical evidence demonstrates a divergence in the processing of free choice permission and scalar implicatures.

Conclusions:

Free choice permission is a distinct type of linguistic inference with unique processing characteristics.
The cognitive mechanisms underlying free choice permission differ from those of scalar implicatures.
This study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how humans process complex linguistic meanings.