Scalar Implicatures in Child Language: Give Children a Chance (original) (raw)

Children"s pragmatic competence in deriving conversational implicatures (and Scalar Implicatures in particular) offers an intriguing standpoint to explore how developmental, methodological and purely theoretical perspectives interact and feed each other. In this paper, we focus mainly on developmental and methodological issues, showing that children from age 6 on are adult-like in deriving the Scalar Implicature related to the scalar quantifier some (i.e. they interpret some as some but not all), while children at age 4 and 5 only sometimes reject underinformativesome in a classical Truth Value Judgment Task (Experiment 1). They do so despite their excellent performance in pragmatic tasks that evaluate their competence with the rules of talk exchange, like the Conversational Violations Test (Experiment 4) and the Felicity Judgment Task (Experiment 5).