ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the research on multilingual adults’ and children’s comprehension of non-literal meanings, an aspect of pragmatic competence that has been relatively well studied in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) and for which there is a fair amount of research with multilingual children. It reviews the evidence from adult and child studies that examined the effect of multilingualism on pragmatic comprehension. The chapter explores an account of multilingual implicature interpretation and development based on the currently available data from the multilingual samples so far examined. It suggests that multilingual implicature interpretation depends to the same degree and on the same non-verbal cognitive mechanisms as in monolinguals. The chapter examines the literature on the verbal and non-verbal cognitive effects of multilingualism. It reviews the evidence from studies that examined implicature understanding skills in adult second language learners and multilingual children.
