Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When someone says 'My soup was warm', they are often understood as saying that it was warm, but not hot. This is assumed to arise via a scalar implicature. According to the standard assumption, 'warm' and 'hot' are in competition and by saying 'warm', we reason that the speaker did not intend to convey 'hot'. This exclusion of alternatives should apply uniformly to any expression that can be ordered on a scale. Yet there are substantial differences in the endorsement rates of the strengthened meaning between various scales. These could be due to the availability of expressions or to the underlying semantic structure. We use priming to measure how active in the mind lexical expressions are. Contrary to the standard assumption, the more an expression was primed, the less likely a scalar implicature was endorsed. We discuss how the semantic structure of adjectives can support pragmatic reasoning without lexical alternatives.