Processing the Meanings of What Speakers Say and Implicate

Abstract

This article reports the findings of 2 experiments examining how people process what speakers say and implicate. Speakers often literally say things that underdetermine what they intended to imply or communicate in context. Many scholars now argue that people analyze what speakers pragmatically say as part of their inferring what speakers pragmatically imply. Our studies examined this idea. We found that people take longer to interpret statements where what speakers imply differs from what they say than it does to comprehend what speakers say when those meanings are similar to what they imply. Listeners report that they indeed analyzed what speakers pragmatically, but not literally, said when interpreting speakers' intended messages. Our revised theory suggests that different kinds of pragmatic knowledge influence people's understandings of what speakers pragmatically say and what they pragmatically imply in context.