Priming scalar alternatives: The effects of negation and antonymy

Radim Lacina, Stavroula Alexandropoulou, Eszter Ronai, and Nicole Gotzner

Weak scalar words such as warm give rise to scalar implicatures that amount to the negation of the stronger term, i.e. warm but not hot. The notion of informationally stronger alternatives has played a crucial role in investigating this phenomenon, yet researchers disagree about whether other alternatives also play a role. Recently, Ronai and Xiang (2023) found evidence for the activation of the stronger term during online implicature derivation. We ran several lexical decision experiments aiming to see if even informationally weaker alternatives are activated by comprehenders. We did this by introducing negation and antonymy. We present a joint analysis of our three single manipulation experiments (negated weak scalars, antonyms, and negated antonyms) together with Exp 2 (weak scalars) from Ronai and Xiang (2023) as well as a recent within-subject pilot manipulating primes and negation. Our results show that while negation managed to diffuse priming as predicted, antonyms were shown to be primed when not negated. We interpret these results within the Alternative Activation Theory (Gotzner, 2017). Finally, planned follow-up studies will be presented.