A cross‐cultural study of ability to interpret implicatures in English

Lawrence F. Bouton

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Linguistics and Language Analysis EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this study was to investigate two questions: (1) to what extent does a person's cultural background affect his or her ability to derive the same meanings from conversational implicatures in English as native English‐speaking Americans do, and (2) can a specially designed multiple‐choice test measure a person's ability to interpret these implicatures? The results show clearly that cultural background is a reliable predictor of nonnative speaker (NNS) ability to interpret implicatures the way native speakers (NSs) do. Not only do NNSs infer different meanings from implicatures than NSs do, but culturally defined subsets of NNSs also perform differently from each other. When variations in English language proficiency are controlled for, the effects of cultural background as measured by a one‐way ANOVA were significant at the 0.0001 level [F(6,323 = 23.83, p < 0.0001]. All of these data were gathered using a multiple‐choice test, which indicates that the answer to our second question cited above is a definite ‘Yes”.

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2016Principles of Pragmatics 1983Pragmatics 1976The universality of conversational postulates

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