Abstract
Sentences can be enriched by considering what the speaker does not say but could have done, the alternative. We conducted two experiments to test whether the salience of the alternative contributes to how people derive implicatures. Participants responded true or false to underinformative categorical sentences that involved quantifiers. Target sentences were sometimes preceded by the alternative and sometimes by a control sentence. When the target was preceded by the alternative, response times to implicature responses were faster than when preceded by the control sentence. This suggests that (1) alternative salience influences higher-level reasoning (2) the cost of deriving implicatures in sentence verification paradigms is due in part to low alternative salience.
Original language | English |
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Article number | e0265781 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | PLoS ONE |
Volume | 17 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 31 Mar 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:Copyright: © 2022 Bott, Frisson. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General