Early non-plural interpretation of 'some' in context:Mouse-tracking evidence for the role of real-time social reasoning

Listeners’ interpretations of an ambiguous word like the scalar quantifier ‘some’ is shown to be contextual (Breheny, Katsos, & Williams, 2006; Politzer-Ahles and Husband,2018), varying from a semantic meaning ‘some and possibly all’ to a pragmatically strengthened meaning ‘some and possibly all’. Loy et al. (2019) further explored that the interpretations of ‘some’ depends on listeners’ reasoning of a speaker’s manner of speech. They found that, within a context where interpreting ‘some’ semantically (to a larger some-and-possibly-all value) is socially undesirable (‘I ate some oreos’), listeners were more likely to make an early commitment to a semantic interpretation (‘I ate some and possibly all oreos’) when the speaker is disfluent (‘I ate, uh, some oreos’). However, listeners no longer associate disfluency with the semantic interpretation of ‘some’ when we varied the social context in one of our mouse-tracking experiments (presented in XPRAG 2022).