An Eyetracking Study On Scalar Implicature Processing Among Chinese Older Adults

As a typical example of conversational implicature,scalar implicature refers to the information that is implicitly communicated and needs to be inferred from a scale.Existing theories on scalar implicature processing can be divided into Neo-Gricean and Post-Gricean approaches.According to the Neo-Gricean approach,scalar implicature is directly generated by words of scale,and compared with lexical-semantic meaning,the processing cost of scalar implicature is less.However,the PostGricean approach believes context should be the source of scalar implicature.Compared with sematiclexical meaning,the cognitive cost of processing scalar implicature is more significant.These two approaches mainly focus on scalar implicature from the semantic scale,while little attention has been paid to another kind of scale,the pragmatic scale.Subsequent empirical studies also mainly discuss semantic scalar implicature and its processing cost but pay less attention to pragmatic scalar implicature and its source,namely words of scale and context.The Chinese lian…dou construction is a particular structure with two primary forms: affirmative form(e.g.,nanhai lian liebao dou zhui-de-shang,zhen jiaojian(“The boy even catches the cheetah.He is so vigorous.”)and negative form(e.g.,nanhai lian wugui dou zhui-bu-shang,zhen chihuan(“The boy does not even catch the tortoise.He is so slow.”).The lian…dou construction serves as an operator to convey the scalar implicature by asserting the least likely items of a scale,and the scalar implicature triggered by it belongs to the pragmatic scalar implicature.There are few studies on scalar implicature evoked by this specific Chinese construction,with mixed findings;even fewer studies have examined the decline of scalar implicature in older adults.Scalar implicature is critical to daily communication,and inferring scalar implicature is an essential pragmatic indicator of language competence.This study consisted of two eyetracking experiments on the scalar implicature evoked by the lian…dou construction among older Chinese adults,with Experiment 1 focusing on the lexical level of scale and Experiment 2 on the discourse level.In Experiment 1,a 2(affirmative vs.negative)x 2(the young adults vs.the older adults)two-factor between-subjects design was adopted using the visual world paradigm to explore the eye movement pattern in the processing of scalar implicatures in the lian…dou construction and the role of words of scale in scalar implicature processing.In the experiment,participants looked at four pictures while listening to a sentence segment,and then chose the most appropriate picture to match the sentence.Both behavioral data and eye data were analyzed using mixed-effects regression model run in R Studio.Eye growth curves indicating proportions of target fixations were measured using the Gaussian Mixed Model run in Matlab and visualized in R.Results showed that the older adults was less accurate and slower than the young adults,and the older adults also showed less and slower fixations to the target picture than the young adults,indicating that compared to the young adults,the older adults were less sensitive on words of scale in scalar implicature processing.Moreover,both groups showed better performance in the affirmative condition than the negative condition.In experiment 2,a 2(affirmative vs.negative)x 2(true vs.false)x 2(the young adults vs.the older adults)three-factor between-subjects design was adopted using the natural reading paradigm to explore the impact of the context on scalar implicature processing.In this experiment,the participant read a complete sentence and then judged the truth value of the sentence.Results showed that the older adults was less accurate and slower than the young adults,while the difference was slighter than that in experiment 1,and the older adults also showed more fixations to the semantically false sentences,showing that context would play an important role and lexical-semantic meaning gave an inference in scalar implicature processing among the older adults.In addition,both groups carried out second-pass processing of scalar implicature.Furthermore,performance in different polarity condition was affected by truth value condition for both groups,indicating context could influence scalar implicature processing.In summary,the study found a decline in processing ability in scalar implicatures evoked by the lian…dou construction among Chinese older adults,which is more connected with the decline of the ability to extract further pragmatic information,which may be related to the inhibition deficit of the older adults.Moreover,the older adults are more prone to understand the lexical-semantic meaning rather than scalar implicature in the lian…dou construction,which may be related to the decline of working memory and cognitive flexibility while world knowledge remains at a relatively high level.Finally,the young and older adults tend to acquire robust scalar implicature more depending on context(especially for the older adults).For investigating the influence of aging-effect on scalar implicature processing based on Chinesespecific lian…dou construction,this study provides some reference for the decline of the pragmatic ability of the older adults,as well as a new perspective for scalar implicature processing and extends and verifies Neo-Gricean and Post-Gricean approaches about the processing of scalar implicature.