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Pragmatic competence and pragmatic tolerance in foreign language acquisition – revisiting the case of scalar implicatures
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Description: Understanding language involves making inferences. One type of inference are scalar implicatures, e.g. understanding that “some X” generally implicates “some but not all X”. Recent research has looked at the derivation of scalar implicatures employing binary sentence judgement tasks investigating differences between native speakers and L2 learners in terms of how they accept some sentences with a weak scalar expression (e.g. “Timothy ate some of the pretzels”) in contexts where the stronger scalar expression would hold true (i.e. where Timothy ate all of the pretzels). Results have been inconclusive, but in part, findings have been taken as evidence that L2 learners are less pragmatically competent than native speakers regarding their scalar implicature derivation abilities. Following evidence from L1 acquisition research, we propose that the binary judgement tasks in L2 research did not measure pragmatic competence, but pragmatic tolerance. Therefore, to measure participants’ pragmatic competence (i.e. sensitivity to underinformativeness) more unambiguously, we introduce into the field of L2 research the use of graded judgement tasks, previously employed in L1 studies. Therefore, we will test L1 and L2 speakers of English in a sentence judgment task with both binary and graded judgment options