Children's Computation of Implicatures (original) (raw)
Related papers
When children are more logical than adults: Experimental investigations of scalar implicature
Cognition, 2001
A conversational implicature is an inference that consists in attributing to a speaker an implicit meaning that goes beyond the explicit linguistic meaning of an utterance. This paper experimentally investigates scalar implicature, a paradigmatic case of implicature in which a speaker's use of a term like Some indicates that the speaker had reasons not to use a more informative one from the same scale, e.g. All; thus, Some implicates Not all. Pragmatic theorists like Grice would predict that a pragmatic interpretation is determined only after its explicit, logical meaning is incorporated (e.g. where Some means at least one).
Children's knowledge of free choice inferences and scalar implicatures (final version)
to appear in Journal of Semantics
This paper presents experimental results showing that four-year-olds are capable of drawing free choice inferences from disjunctive statements and from statements containing free choice indefinites, despite not being able to compute inferences of exclusivity for disjunctive statements, or other scalar implicatures. The findings ap- pear to challenge accounts that attempt to unify the two kinds of inferences (Kratzer & Shimoyama 2002; Alonso Ovalle 2005; Fox 2007; Klinedinst 2007; Chemla 2010; van Rooij 2010; Franke 2011; Chierchia 2013). We discuss, however, the compatibility of the child data with a recent approach in the experimental literature, which attributes children’s failures to compute scalar implicatures to a difficulty with alternatives: children may either lack lexical knowledge of the relevant alterna- tives, or the comparison of alternatives may exceed children’s processing resources (Gualmini, Crain, Meroni, Chierchia & Guasti 2001; Chierchia, Crain, Guasti & Thornton 2001; Reinhart 2006; Barner, Brooks & Bale 2011; Singh, Wexler, Astle, Kamawar & Fox under review). Based on the results of two experiments, we propose a more general explanation for children’s selective success on scalar inferences, according to which alternatives are generally unproblematic for children, unless the lexical retrieval of the necessary alternatives is required.
Accessing the unsaid: The role of scalar alternatives in children’s pragmatic inference
Cognition, 2011
When faced with a sentence like, ''Some of the toys are on the table", adults, but not preschoolers, compute a scalar implicature, taking the sentence to imply that not all the toys are on the table. This paper explores the hypothesis that children fail to compute scalar implicatures because they lack knowledge of relevant scalar alternatives to words like ''some". Four-year-olds were shown pictures in which three out of three objects fit a description (e.g., three animals reading), and were asked to evaluate statements that relied on context-independent alternatives (e.g., knowing that all is an alternative to some for the utterance ''Some of the animals are reading") or contextual alternatives (e.g., knowing that the set of all three visible animals is an alternative to a set of two for the utterance ''Only the cat and the dog are reading"). Children failed to reject the false statements containing context-independent scales even when the word only was used (e.g., only some), but correctly rejected equivalent statements containing contextual alternatives (e.g., only the cat and dog). These results support the hypothesis that children's difficulties with scalar implicature are due to a failure to generate relevant alternatives for specific scales. Consequences for number word learning are also discussed.
Scalar Implicatures in Child Language: Give Children a Chance
Language learning and development, 2011
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).
Scalar and ad-Hoc pragmatic inferences in children: guess which one is easier.
Journal of Child Language, 2020
Several studies investigated preschoolers' ability to compute scalar and ad-hoc implicatures, but only one compared children's performance with both kinds of implicature with the same task, a picture selection task. In Experiment 1 (N = 58, age: 4;2-6;0), we first show that the truth value judgment task, traditionally employed to investigate children's pragmatic ability, prompts a rate of pragmatic responses comparable to the picture selection task. In Experiment 2 (N = 141, age: 3;8-9;2) we used the picture selection task to compare scalar and ad-hoc implicatures and linked the ability to derive these implicatures to some cognitive and linguistic measures. We found that four-and five-year-olds children performed better on ad-hoc than on scalar implicatures. Furthermore, we found that morphosyntactic competence was associated with success in both kinds of implicatures, while performance on mental state reasoning was positively associated with success on scalar but not ad-hoc implicatures.
Cognitive Development, 1998
Four experiments investigated 4-to 6-year-olds' transitive inferences. In Experiments 1-3, there was a nonmapping condition in which inferences were made either about stacked blocks, or about sticks ordered left to right. In the mapping condition, inferences were made by mapping either from blocks to sticks, or the reverse. In Experiments 2-4, relational complexity was manipulated by requiring either 1 or 2 premise relations to be processed in a single decision. Mapping was harder than nonmapping, but relational complexity was the main source of variance, with 2 relations being harder in both mapping and nonmapping conditions. The percentage of participants integrating 2 relations in a single decision was estimated at 20% at age 4,53% at age 5 and 57% at age 6, suggesting gradual development of transitive inference ability. Results suggest that relational complexity has a strong effect on transitive inference in 4-to 6-year-old children.
Children's Knowledge of Free Choice Inferences and Scalar Implicatures
Journal of Semantics, 2015
This paper presents experimental results showing that 4-and 5-year-old children are capable of drawing free choice inferences from disjunctive statements and from statements containing free choice indefinites, despite not being able to compute inferences of exclusivity for disjunctive statements, or other scalar implicatures. The findings appear to challenge accounts that attempt to unify the two kinds of inferences (