Social Context Modulates Tolerance for Pragmatic Violations in Binary but Not Graded Judgments

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Binary judgments of underinformative statements are common for studying pragmatic processing.
• Acceptance of such statements is often interpreted as a failure to compute scalar implicatures, suggesting cognitive cost.
• Previous research indicates children may have greater tolerance for pragmatic violations than adults.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the role of pragmatic tolerance in adult binary judgment tasks.
• To examine if manipulating speaker social attributes influences adults' acceptance of underinformative statements.
• To challenge the assumption that binary judgments accurately reflect pragmatic competence and cognitive cost.

Main Methods:

• Experiment 1: Adults made binary judgments on underinformative statements after speaker social attributes were manipulated.
• Experiment 2: Adults made graded judgments on underinformative statements with the same speaker manipulation.
• Comparison of results between binary and graded judgment tasks.

Main Results:

• Speaker social attribute manipulation significantly affected acceptability rates in binary judgments (Experiment 1).
• The same manipulation did not affect acceptability rates in graded judgments (Experiment 2).
• Adults' acceptance of underinformative statements varied based on speaker characteristics in binary tasks.

Conclusions:

• Binary judgment tasks may not reliably measure pragmatic processing or cognitive costs.
• Pragmatic tolerance, influenced by social factors, may explain acceptance rates in binary tasks.
• Existing evidence suggesting scalar implicature computation is cognitively costly, especially in children, needs re-evaluation.