Only the (informationally) stronger survive: A probe recognition study with scale-mates and antonyms

Speakers often use scalar words such as warm in a pragmatically strengthened way that results in the conveyed meaning being warm but not hot. In these inferences, known as scalar implicatures, meaning alternatives have been postulated to play a crucial role. Upon encountering warm, the informationally stronger alternative hot has been shown to be active in online sentence processing. Antonyms (cool) have also been shown to be activated in the same way even though they are standardly assumed to not be involved in scalar implicature derivation. In the current study, we focus on the question of whether both strong scalar alternatives and antonyms are represented in the final mental model of the discourse following scalar implicature derivation. We ran two probe recognition experiments, testing strong scalars and antonyms. We found an interference effect for strong scalars, indicating their representation, but not one for antonyms. Thus, we provide evidence that only the strong scalars survive in the eventual representation of the pragmatic meaning of a sentence.