Scalar implicatures are inferences that arise when a weak expression is used instead of a stronger alternative. For example, when a speaker says, "Some of the children are in the classroom," she often implies that not all of them are. Recent processing studies of scalar implicatures have argued that generating an implicature carries a…

We investigate whether people might come to produce utterances that they regard as ungrammatical by examining the production of ungrammatical verb-construction combinations (e.g., "The dancer donates the soldier the apple") after exposure to both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. We contrast two accounts of how such production might take…

Research has shown that following a sentence fragment such as "John impressed Mary because...," people are most likely to refer to John, whereas following "John admired Mary because...," Mary is the preferred referent. Two written completion experiments investigated whether such semantic biases affect the choice of anaphor (pronouns vs. names).…