The cognitive psychological distinctions between levels of meaning

• Published in: Language sciences (Oxford) 2023-11, Vol.100, p.101583, Article 101583
• Main Authors: Rahman, Abduwali, Liu, Zhenqian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cognitive priority; Contextual effect; Levels of meaning; Psychological reality; Utterance type
• ISSN: 0388-0001
• DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2023.101583

This study is an attempt to investigate the psychological reality and cognitive priority of three layers of linguistic meaning—what is said, impliciture, and implicature. According to the literal-first serial processing model, what is said is psychologically real and is required to draw an impliciture and/or implicature. By contrast, the impliciture-by-default processing model argues that there is psychological reality for impliciture and implicature but not for what is said, and that impliciture has cognitive priority over the other two levels. Finally, the parallel processing model does not make a strong assumption about the temporal order of interpretation. A mouse-tracking experiment in a listening comprehension task was designed to test the predictions of the three accounts. It examined how participants grasp the three levels of meaning in two tests, one in which a preferred interpretation of an utterance (either with what is said, impliciture or implicature) is confirmed and another where this interpretation is negated. Results show that participants were consciously aware of each of the three meanings in both tests. Their comprehension was more accurate and faster when they were prompted for what is said and implicitures compared to implicatures in the confirmation test. But they were delayed in processing time for implicitures in the negation test. Furthermore, they exhibited different comprehension patterns across different impliciture and implicature types. Thus, the current study provides mixed evidence for the existing theories of linguistic meaning by failing to find strong support for any of them. By showing how to integrate the three traditional models, this study suggests a way forward that what is said has psychological reality and impliciture has a special cognitive status depending on the context and yet that pragmatic inferences may vary in degree across utterance types. •Three levels of utterance meaning, what is said, impliciture and implicature, are made available as distinct.•Both what is said and impliciture usually arise by default and have the same impact on pragmatic reasoning; But in unusual circumstances, impliciture, like implicature, is delayed in time relative to what is said.•The generation of impliciture and implicature may vary substantially in processing between different utterance types.