Interpreting numerals and scalar items under memory load

A sentence such as ‘Four children are blond’ can be interpreted as meaning either that at least four children are blond (weak reading), or that exactly four children are blond (strong reading). On the classical neo-Gricean view (Horn 1972), this ambiguity is similar to the ambiguity generated by scalar terms such as ‘some’, for which both a weak reading (i.e., some (possibly all)) and a strong reading (i.e., some but not all) are available. On this view, the strong reading of numerals, just like the strong reading of ‘some’, is derived as a scalar implicature (SI), on the basis of the weak reading. However, more recent studies have found significant differences between the two phenomena. The syntactic distribution of the strong reading is not the same in both cases (Horn 1992, Breheny 2008), and children seem to acquire the strong reading of numerals before they acquire the strong reading of standard scalar items (Noveck 2001, a.o.). Using a dual task approach, we provide evidence for another type of difference between numerals and standard scalar items. We show that tapping memory resources has opposite effects on ‘some’ and on bare numerals. Under high cognitive load, participants reported fewer SIs for sentences involving ‘some’ (compared to low cognitive load conditions), but they report more strong readings for sentences involving bare numerals. We discuss the consequences of this result for the current theoretical debates regarding the semantics of numerals.