Are second language speakers more pragmatically tolerant? Explaining the differences in scalar implicature generation between L2 and L1

Children’s difficulties with Scalar Implicature (SI) generation have been argued to stem from their tolerance towards pragmatic violations rather than from issues with the inferential process per se (Katsos & Bishop 2011). Ternary judgment tasks have been used to support this view. In these tasks, when presented with underinformative sentences, children, as well as adults, choose an intermediate option between acceptance and rejection, thus demonstrating sensitivity to underinformativeness. Some recent studies show that adult second language (L2) speakers also generate SIs at lower rates. In this work, we investigated whether pragmatic tolerance, possibly emerging because of limited language exposure, could explain the difference between (adult) L2 and L1 speakers. Contrary to our expectations, neither our L1 control group nor our L2 groups (L2 High and L2 Low Proficiency) consistently selected the intermediate
option when judging underinformative sentences. However, the L2 Low Proficiency group showed a significantly higher tendency to accept underinformative sentences compared to the L1 group. Hence, our results do not support the hypothesis that L2 speakers are more pragmatically tolerant than L1 speakers. However, our findings show that, despite the adoption of a ternary judgment task, low-proficient L2 speakers display a strong tendency to interpret underinformative sentences literally. We argue that this tendency in the L2 can be attributed to the increased cognitive effort involved in SI generation.