Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When evaluating the truth of a sentence, we do not always have full information available. While there exists psycholinguistic research on how an uncertain speaker influences a listener's quantifier processing and interpretation, it remains difficult to disentangle a listener's preferred utterances from ones they merely tolerate as acceptable if uttered by someone else. In the presented research, we investigate how readers process assertable and non-assertable quantified statements in epistemically uncertain situations. We focus on the weak and strong scalar implicatures for the quantifier "some", which arise in such contexts. We show differential ERP effects depending on whether participants adopt the weak or strong pragmatic interpretation. We also show that partial-information contexts are associated with a late and sustained negativity effect, likely signalling epistemic context monitoring.