Involvement of prefrontal cortex in scalar implicatures: evidence from magnetoencephalography

Abstract

The present study investigated the neural correlates of the realisation of scalar inferences, i.e., the interpretation of some as meaning some but not all. We used magnetoencephalography, which has high temporal resolution, to measure neural activity while participants heard stories that included the scalar inference trigger some in contexts that either provide strong cues for a scalar inference or provide weaker cues. The middle portion of the lateral prefrontal cortex (Brodmann area 46) showed an increased response to some in contexts with fewer cues to the inference, suggesting that this condition elicited greater effort. While the results are not predicted by traditional all-or-nothing accounts of scalar inferencing that assume the process is always automatic or always effortful, they are consistent with more recent gradient accounts which predict that the speed and effort of scalar inferences is strongly modulated by numerous contextual factors.

Keywords: magnetoencephalography; pragmatics; prefrontal cortex; quantifiers; scalar implicature.

Figure 1.. Left: mean percentages of “yes” responses (indicating lower-bounded or non-pragmatic readings); error bars represent ±2 × SE (the standard error of the by-subject means). Right: histograms of the subject means for some and only some items (averaged across upper-bounded and lower-bounded contexts).

Figure 2.. Current estimates for regions showing FDR-significant or -marginal interactions. The time window of the significant cluster is highlighted in grey, and the upper left portion of each plot shows the spatial location of the vertices comprising that region. SOME_all: some in the “all” (upper-bounded, strongly inference-supporting) context; SOME_any: some in the “any” (lower-bounded, only weakly inference-supporting) context; ONLYSOME_all: only some in the “all” (upper-bounded) context; ONLYSOME_any: only some in the “any” (lower-bounded) context.