T. Matsui. Modeling and Using Context (Proceedings of the conference CONTEXT 2001, Dundee, UK, July), volume 2116 of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, chapter Experimental Pragmatics: Towards Testing Relevance-Based Predictions about Anaphoric Bridging Inferences, pages 248–258. Springer, Berlin, 2001.  [url]

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In this paper, the author explain a methodological procedure to verify some implicatures of the relevance theory. The author propose to use an important phenomena of communication that is defined in the context of the relevance theory. What follows from this theory is that: a) there is a natural tendency for the speaker to formulate an utterance so that the hearer has easy access to the intended cognitive effects to the utterance; b) there is the same natural tendency for the hearer to infer the intended cognitive effects of the utterance at the earliest point possible.

Subsequently, the author propose to test the comprehension latency of two types of utterance pair. The difference in processing time is reported to how highly accessible the implicature of each utterance is, which possibly facilitate explicature derivation and in turn the whole interpretation process.

The author compares the ability of the Relevance Theory to capture this natual processing of communication with Levinson’s Generalised Implicature Model, testing the two on a Stereotipical Bridging Implicature towards a non Stereotypical one. RT seems to be the most capable to describe human inference process.