L2 Learners’ Comprehension of Conversational Implicatures

This study delves into Korean vocational college and university students’ comprehension of conversational implicatures in terms of perceived and actual difficulty. For this purpose, the study employs an implicature test. The participants are 126 vocational college students and 121 university students. The analysis demonstrates that conversational implicatures were more difficult for the vocational college students to comprehend than they were for the university students and that indirect criticism proved the most troublesome type of implicature for the two learner groups. The findings further show that the college group had a higher level of perceived difficulty with all five types of implicatures than the university group, whereas the former group had a higher level of actual test performance difficulty than the latter group, especially with relevance, POPE-Q, and Minimum Requirement Rule implicatures. Correlation analyses indicate that the learners’ perceived difficulty was not always in consonance with their actual difficulty. On the basis of the results, the study provides helpful suggestions to help the learners improve their comprehension of conversational implicatures.