Extension of Dieuleveut et al. (Full Knowledge + False Belief+Epistemic Test)
Creators: name: Spector, Benjamin
name: Poisson, Nicolas
Publisher: name: OSF Registries
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Linguistics
subject: FOS: Languages and literature
subject: Semantics and Pragmatics
subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences

description: Summary (the details are all in the attached pdf document)

Dieuleveut, Chemla &amp; Spector (2019) tested for the existence of three distinct readings for sentences involving the quantifier some and numerals, as well as other items). A sentence such ‘Some of the cards are red’ is potentially ambiguous between a literal meaning (‘some and possibly all cards are red’), a reading with a primary implicature (‘some cards are red and the speaker does not believe that all cards are red’), and a reading with a secondary implicature (‘some but not all of the cards are red and the speaker knows that). Similar readings can be defined for numerals. Dieuleveut et al. showed people 4 kinds of situations, manipulating both the number of red cards among 8 cards, and the information available to a fictitious speaker (we illustrate here their design in the case of the sentence ‘some of the cards are red’). In the FALSE condition, no card is red, and the speaker knows that. In the LITERAL condition, only the literal reading is true, and the speaker knows that: the speaker sees that all cards are red. In the PRIMARY condition, the literal reading and the one with a primary implicature are true, but the secondary reading is false (this situation shows a speaker who sees 4 out of 8 cards, where the 4 visible cards are red, while the others are hidden). In the SECONDARY condition, all readings are true (the speaker sees 8 cards, of which exactly 4 are red). Dieuleveut asked whether, in each situation, the speaker can say the sentence ‘Some of the cards are red’. They found that the rate of ‘yes’ answers is significantly higher for the SECONDARY condition than for the PRIMARY condition, which is itself higher than for the LITERAL condition, which is itself higher than for the FALSE condition. The observed difference between SECONDARY and PRIMARY is unexpected if the only thing that matters is whether the speaker is in a position to use the alternative sentence ‘All of the cards are red’, since in both cases the speaker is not in a position to use the all-alternative. Dieuleveut et al. argued that this could provide evidence for the ‘grammatical approach’ to scalar implicatures. However, as they note, it is possible that the reason why some participants say ‘No’ in the PRIMARY condition is that the speaker might believe that the listener wrongly believes that the speaker sees all the cards, in which case the ‘some’-sentence might be misleading because it would lead such a listener to infer ‘not all’.

In a previous experiment, preregistered at https://osf.io/rbvse, we ran a conceptual replication of Dieuleveut et al., using only numerals and ‘some’, with one main difference: we made it very explicit that the listener sees exactly how many cards are visible to the speaker, and we described the speaker as talking to this listener. We found no significant difference between SECONDARY and PRIMARY for ‘some’, but we did find one for numerals. The rates of ‘yes’ answer for the literal condition were much higher than in the original Dieuleveut et al. experiments, showing that fewer people access a reading with an implicature (primary or secondary) in our replication.

The goal of the current study is to add situations where the listener is presented as being misinformed about the number of visible cards in the speaker’s hand, and the speaker is aware of this. The idea is that in such situations, participants might find that the speaker should not use the ‘some’ sentence in the PRIMARY condition where she sees 4 red cards and 4 other cards are hidden, because the listener, who believes the speaker sees all cards, would in fact infer ‘some but not all’ (similarly for the sentences with numerals). 




So, schematically, we define conditions by 2 factors: ‘epistemic situation’ (‘Full Knowledge’, FK, where the listener sees how many cards the speaker has, and the speaker knows that, and ‘False Belief’, FB, where the listener has a false belief about what the speaker sees) and ‘reading’ (with 4 levels: FALSE, LITERAL,PRIMARY, SECONDARY). This defines the following 8 conditions, for each quantifier (‘some’ or the numeral ‘four’)

FK-False, FK-Literal, FK-primary, FK-secondary
FB-False, FB-Literal, FB-primary, FB-secondary

For each quantifier (‘some’ or ‘Num’), we will test whether the difference between the PRIMARY and SECONDARY conditions for both FB and FK is significant, as well as whether the effect of PRIMARY/SECONDARY is modulated by the epistemic situation (FB or FK) .

We will thus perform 3 tests for each quantifier, and will correct for multiple comparisons