The effect of online methods on epistemic inference and scalar implicature

How is research on semantics and pragmatics impacted by the growing use of online methodologies, and how does the modality of presentation impact our ability to detect and use a speaker’s knowledge state in the service of a linguistic inference? In three experiments, we investigated scalar implicatures both in-person and across three online modalities (text, text+pictures, and video) using a task that required participants to monitor contextual information to infer the mental states of speakers (i.e., whether they were knowledgeable or ignorant with respect to stronger alternative statements). In Experiments 1 and 2 we found no consistent differences across modalities in rates of scalar implicatures, and found that participants rarely computed implicatures when speakers were ignorant (i.e., participants were sensitive to a speaker’s knowledge state across all modalities). However, in these first two experiments participants were explicitly reminded to monitor the knowledge state of speakers. In Experiment 3, when these reminders were removed, we again found no effect of modality when speakers were knowledgeable, but found a significant effect when speakers were ignorant. In particular, participants were more likely to erroneously compute implicatures when tested in-person relative to when they were tested online with text only, or with text and pictures. These findings suggest that online methods may in certain cases offer a useful alternative to in-person testing of pragmatic reasoning, but that care should be taken in selecting methods when they probe subtle mental state reasoning.