Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present two experiments investigating the production of implicit constructions. Using a confederate scripting paradigm we find that after making an inference participants were more likely to subsequently produce an implicature. This effect occurred at a global and a local level and was unaffected by the perceived role of the conversational partner. Our findings demonstrate that the choice of whether to be implicit is determined by the activation levels of representations specific to implicatures and that inference and implications have overlapping processing representations.