Lexical access and scalarity: an experimental approach to the access from weak to strong adjectives in Spanish

Abstract

Some recent studies have questioned the so-called uniformity hypothesis — a principle stating that Horn scales give raise, if context allows it, to scalar implicatures (SI). These studies have shown that different scales from diverse grammatical categories will give rise to a wide range of derivation frequencies of SI. The idea is that the use of a weak element does not guarantee the derivation of an SI. Among some of the phenomena that explain this fluctuation is semantic distance, for example. Nevertheless, little is known about the role of certain lexical and cognitive phenomena such as lexical access in the derivation process. I present here an experimental study based on a lexical decision task using a masked priming effect. The aim of the study was to elucidate the extent to which the weak element of an adjectival scale can activate the strong one in terms of lexical access. The results show that in certain cases, exposure to the weak element does not always activate the strong one, which could eventually affect the frequency of derivation of SI, at least in the case of adjectival scales in Spanish.