What a speaker communicates embraces both what a speaker says and what a speaker implicates by what is said. Linguists and philosophers of language have extensively studied sentences allegedly giving rise to generalized conversational implicatures. However, an understanding of the psychological processes underlying the interpretation of such sentences is currently lacking. This study attempts to apply well-established psycholinguistic methods to this new area.
We have identified three rival pragmatic processing models that embody features of the major competing theories. The models inspired by Gricean ideas are committed to a stage in processing at which a minimal proposition is accessed or accessible, whereas models inspired by Relevance theory deny that a minimal proposition needs to be retrieved unless the context is biased towards such an interpretation. This project proposes a series of 10 experiments, using both self-paced reading tasks and reading tasks during which eye-movements are monitored, to test the predictions of these rival models.
