So what you're really saying is...

Our ability to comprehend language relies on our pragmatic capacity to infer meaning that extends beyond the literal content of words, phrases, and sentences. In this study we used eye-tracking to investigate the processing costs associated with generating and cancelling one type of pragmatic inference, scalar implicatures, during reading. Our findings demonstrate that readers show increased reading times and patterns of re-reading when implicatures are cancelled, suggesting that readers do represent inferential meanings that are not overtly present in the text. Our results help to inform theoretical accounts of linguistic knowledge and how that knowledge is integrated into sentence processing.