Scalar implicatures
Shuo Feng · 2024
Research on scalar implicatures has grown over the past several decades and represents a truly interdisciplinary field. Linguists, psychologists, and cognitive psychologists have all made important contributions to this line of research by examining comprehension of scalar implicatures among native speakers, second language speakers, and atypically developed adults and children. The primary focus of this chapter is to review the experimental studies that have investigated the processing and acquisition of scalar implicatures with an emphasis on second language speakers and to describe some of the main findings, as well as the methodological approaches that have been used to investigate the topic. I first consider the phenomenon of scalar implicatures, followed by a brief overview of the major theoretical approaches to the study of this phenomenon. After reviewing relevant work from psycholinguistics and child language acquisition, I then discuss more recent studies that have investigated second language speakers’ acquisition of scalar implicatures. I conclude with reflections on future directions for research in the field.