The present study aimed to investigate whether contextual factors influence how a reference is processed in discourse. We used intact and violated presuppositions (PSP), triggered by a definite or indefinite noun phrase, to monitor the reference process. In one sentence set, a contextual referent was explicitly mentioned close or far from the PSP-triggering noun phrase (memory context). In another sentence set, a referent was not explicitly mentioned in the context, but an inference to a referent was either plausible or implausible due to contextual semantic relations (inference context). Participants were asked to rate the coherence of the discourse after listening to it. Our results revealed a strong influence of the temporal distance of the contextual presentation of a referent. When the referent was far in the context (memory context), PSP violations were judged to be less severe than for close referents, suggesting that they are less clearly represented in memory. Furthermore, PSP violations seemed to play a subordinate role when the semantic context provided a basis for the plausible presence of a referent (inference context). Our results suggest that discourse comprehension involves referential processes whose importance may fade with distance in memory or may be obscured by semantic contextual content.

Recent research has reported superior socio-communicative skills in bilingual children. We examined the hypothesis of a bilingual pragmatic advantage by testing bilingual, bi-dialectal and monolingual children on the comprehension and processing of various pragmatic meanings: relevance, scalar, contrastive, manner implicatures, novel metaphors and irony. Pragmatic responses were slower than literal responses to control items. Furthermore, children were least accurate with metaphors and irony. Metaphors and irony were also the most difficult to process; for these meanings, pragmatic responses were slower than literal responses to the same critical items. Finally, pragmatic performance positively correlated with working memory. Despite this variation, we found no bilingual or bi-dialectal advantage over monolinguals in pragmatic responses or speed of pragmatic processing. This was also true despite bilinguals’ and bi-dialectals’ lower vocabularies as measured by formal tests. We conclude that bilingual children exhibit monolingual-like pragmatic interpretation, despite their often-reported weaker language knowledge in the target language.

An analysis of the English adverb then is suggested, which treats it as ambiguous, encoding two distinct meanings, one of which is anaphoric and corresponds to the meaning of the Norwegian temporal adverb da, and the other is non-anaphoric and corresponds to the meaning of the Norwegian temporal adverb så. The paper challenges the commonly made assumption that cases of supposed ambiguity which exist cross-linguistically might be better reanalyzed in terms of a univocal semantics and a range of pragmatic inferences, either as implicated meanings along Gricean lines or as the outcome of context-dependent inference at the explicit level of content, in keeping with the practice of adherents of Relevance Theory. Data from some other European languages and four African languages are examined and compared to the polar situations represented by English on the one hand and Norwegian on the other.