A long-standing question in language understanding iswhether pragmatic inferences are effortful or whether theyhappen seamlessly without measurable cognitive effort. Wehere measure the strength of particularized pragmatic infer-ences in a setting with high vs. low cognitive load. Cognitiveload is induced by a secondary dot tracking task. If this type ofpragmatic inference comes at no cognitive processing cost, in-ferences should be similarly strong in both the high and the lowload condition. If they are effortful, we expect a smaller effectsize in the dual tasking condition. Our results show that partic-ipants who have difficulty in dual tasking (as evidenced by in-correct answers to comprehension questions) exhibit a smallerpragmatic effect when they were distracted with a secondarytask in comparison to the single task condition. This findingsupports the idea that pragmatic inferences are effortful.

Utterances mentioning a highly predictable event are known to elicit atypicality inferences (Kravtchenko and Demberg, 2015; 2022). In those studies, pragmatic inferences are measured based on typicality ratings. It is assumed that comprehenders notice the redundancy and "repair'' the utterance informativity by inferring that the mentioned event is atypical for the referent, resulting in a lower typicality rating. However, the actual inferences that people make have never been elicited. We extend the original experimental design by asking participants to explain their ratings and administering several individual differences tests. This allows us to test (1) whether low ratings indeed correspond to the assumed inferences (they mostly do, but occasionally participants seem to make the inference but then reject it and give high ratings), and (2) whether the tendency to make atypicality inferences is modulated by cognitive factors. We find that people with higher reasoning abilities are more likely to draw inferences.

While some first results in the literature indicate a relationship between pragmatic processing and specific personality traits or cognitive properties, no results to date show whether an individual makes consistent inferences across different pragmatic tasks or throughout time. In the present longitudinal study, we address these questions by collecting the data on seven types of implicature tasks (including classic scalar implicatures, embedded scalars, and implicatures based on informational redundancy), for the same set of participants. Additionally, we relate the propensity of drawing pragmatic inferences to participants' cognitive and personality profiles. Results show a strong consistency in pragmatic inferences within individuals across time, and between highly similar implicature tasks, but no correlation between different classes of implicatures such as those based on quantifiers vs. not, suggesting that these are subject to different processes. Furthermore, of the individual differences examined, only memory updating was associated with pragmatic competence in bare numerals.