Elcos are common, ajajatas are weird: Manner implicatures guide the interpretation of unfamiliar words for French children and for adults in 18 languages.
Overly long or effortful utterances are interpreted as carrying more information than short or easy ones-a phenomenon known as manner implicatures in pragmatics. Can this mechanism guide the interpretation of unfamiliar words? In seven studies testing adults (N = 1,762) and children (N = 282), participants had to pair...