The Role of Executive Function and Theory of Mind in Pragmatic Computations

In sentences such as “Some dogs are mammals,” the literal semantic meaning (“Some and possibly all dogs are mammals”) conflicts with the pragmatic meaning (“ Not all dogs are mammals,” known as a scalar implicature ). Prior work has shown that adults vary widely in the extent to which they adopt the semantic or pragmatic meaning of such utterances, yet the underlying reason for this variation is unknown. Drawing on theoretical models of scalar...