Are L2 Speakers Fully Gricean?

Grice's Cooperative Principle and the Maxims of Conversation are one of the most influential theories in pragmatics as well as in philosophy of language.Taking the Maxim of Quantity as a point cut,some previous research have studied whether and how violations of Gricean Maxim of Quantity affected the real-time processing of referring expressions,diverging on how the processing was affected by referential ambiguity and redundancy.The present study pioneered to investigate whether and how violations of Gricean Maxim of Quantity affected L2 processing through the self-paced reading paradigm.Two interrelated experiments were conducted to explore whether the Gricean Maxims were just a set of abstract concepts theoretically or they had psychological reality in L2 processing,and whether L2 learners were sensitive to referential ambiguity and redundancy.The result showed that participants significantly slowed down when encountering the modified nouns serving as referring expressions in one-referent context,indicating that their comprehension were immediately impaired by referential redundancy;while there was no difference between the reading speeds of bare nouns serving as referring expressions in one-referent and two-referent contexts,which indicated that referential ambiguity did not affect their comprehension.Thus,it is concluded that L2 learners are sensitive to referential redundancy while not to referential ambiguity;despite that Gricean Maxims partly guide L2 processing,they are not as critical as other factors such as lexical-semantic representation of referring expressions in L2 referential processing.To what extend the Gricean theory has psychological reality needs to be studied further.