Overlapping Mechanisms in Implying and Inferring

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Previous research on Gricean implicature primarily focused on listener comprehension (inference).
• The production aspect (implication) of implicature remains less understood despite its link to comprehension.
• A comprehensive understanding requires investigating shared processes between speaker implication and listener inference.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate shared cognitive processes underlying implicature production and inference.
• To gain a more integral understanding of how speakers imply and listeners infer meaning.
• To explore the relationship between utterance production and comprehension in dialogue.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments utilized a dialogue game where participants and confederates engaged in communication.
• Global priming (predominantly implicit or explicit confederate utterances) and local priming (trial-to-trial utterance structure variation) were manipulated.
• Participants had the choice to use implicature (imply) or explicit expressions.

Main Results:

• Speaker and listener alignment in the use of implicatures was observed.
• Local priming results suggest shared implicature representations between speakers and listeners.
• Global priming results indicate the influence of audience design on implicature use.

Conclusions:

• The findings demonstrate a convergence of cognitive processes in implicature production and inference.
• Evidence supports the existence of shared representations influencing both how we imply and how we understand implications.
• A model of implicature production is proposed, explaining the observed alignment and audience design effects.