Previous L2 studies used binary Truth-Value-Judgment (TVJ) tasks to investigate L1–L2 differences in scalar implicature derivation (some X implicates some but not all X). They examined participants’ judgments of sentences with weak scalar expressions (“Timothy ate some of the pretzels”) when stronger ones are true (“Timothy ate all of the pretzels”). Some studies indicate adult L2 learners are less likely than L1 users to accept such statements while others found the opposite, concluding that implicature derivation is “costly” for L2 learners, rendering them less pragmatically competent than L1 users. Importantly, related L1 research suggests that TVJ tasks only capture sensitivity to under-informativeness. This sensitivity might be completely overridden by metalinguistic attitudes in binary tasks, whereas graded tasks reveal nuanced judgment patterns. Exploring L2 response behaviors, we tested English L1 speakers and competent German L2 English learners using binary and graded tasks. In both tasks, we found evidence of pragmatic responding with no evidence of differences between groups. Bayes factor analyses of the graded data favored H0 over the hypotheses that L2 learners provide fewer or more rejections to under-informative input than L1 learners. We explore implications for L2 learners’ pragmatic abilities, differences with previous studies, and the role of TVJ tasks in under-informative contexts.

Several studies investigated preschoolers’ ability to compute scalar and ad-hoc implicatures, but only one compared children's performance with both kinds of implicature with the same task, a picture selection task. In Experiment 1 (N = 58, age: 4;2-6;0), we first show that the truth value judgment task, traditionally employed to investigate children's pragmatic ability, prompts a rate of pragmatic responses comparable to the picture selection task. In Experiment 2 (N = 141, age: 3;8-9;2) we used the picture selection task to compare scalar and ad-hoc implicatures and linked the ability to derive these implicatures to some cognitive and linguistic measures. We found that four- and five-year-olds children performed better on ad-hoc than on scalar implicatures. Furthermore, we found that morphosyntactic competence was associated with success in both kinds of implicatures, while performance on mental state reasoning was positively associated with success on scalar but not ad-hoc implicatures.

We examine first language (L1) attrition among 30 L1 Spanish – L2 English speakers living in the United Kingdom. We also tested 30 recently-arrived Spaniards to the UK as a baseline. We present several key findings: 1) attrition fluctuates over time and does not affect all individuals equally; 2) entropy can explain said fluctuation of attritional affects over time such that while length of residence and age of arrival may affect the depth of attrition, how often one is exposed to her native language, how often she uses it and for how long each day, who her friends are, and to which types of input she is regularly exposed, seemingly aid in the maintenance or loss of linguistic knowledge; 3) though offline scalar interpretations among bilinguals were predicted by canonical sociolinguistic variables, the online data revealed an overall insensitivity to pragmatic violations. Thus, offline and online methods combine to be more explanatory regarding the comprehension and processing of implicature generating quantifiers.