Some Pieces Are Missing: Implicature Production in Children (original) (raw)
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Implicit alternatives insufficient for children ’ s implicatures with some *
2015
Human communication often expresses more than what is explicitly said. To convey and retrieve additional information beyond what is literally encoded, speakers and hearers exploit certain inferential principles, often called implicatures. This paper is concerned with one well-known such case of pragmatic inference, namely scalar implicatures (SIs) with the quantifier some. Take (1) as an illustration. Though the literal meaning of the sentence in (1a) is equivalent to (1b), (1a) communicates (1c):
On the Acquisition of "Some" and "All." Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, No. 9
1974
Comprehension of the quantifiers "soma" and "all" was studied with 202 children, three to nine years old. Thirty-two i quantifier sentences dealing with descriptions of circles and squares were presented to the children. Wooden objects were presented to some children to see if results were affected by the choice of abstract objects, but no differences were found. The relationship of "over-interpreting" quantifiers to acquisition was analyzed. "Over-interpretation" is to understand "all" as occupying both possible sentence positions: as a sentence quantifier and as A. quantifier in an adjective phrase. Interpretations of %all" ai an adverb and as an adjective are analyzed, and deep structure positions and over-interpretation are discussed. "Double-some" sentences, the extensive "some," the intensive "some," reversals, and quantifier order are also discussed. {SW)
Quantity implicature and access to scalar alternatives in language acquisition
Proceedings of SALT, 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 the relevant scalar alternatives to words like some. Four-year-olds were shown pictures in which three out of three objects fit a description (eg, three animals reading), and were asked to evaluate statements that relied ...
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2016
Although monolingual children do not generally calculate the upper-bounded scalar implicature (SI) associated with ‘some’ without additional support, monolingual Spanish-speaking children have been reported to do so with algunos (‘some’), and further distinguish algunos from unos. Given documented cross-linguistic influence in interface phenomena in bilinguals, we asked whether young Spanish-English bilinguals calculate SIs with algunos, or if there is an effect of acquiring languages with overlapping but diverging lexical entries. Two experiments reveal that not only do bilinguals inconsistently calculate SIs, Spanish monolinguals do not always either. In Experiment 1, bilinguals did not calculate the SI associated with algunos. However, in Experiment 2, which calls upon their awareness of speaker-hearer dynamics, they did. This research highlights the challenges arising from interpreting linguistic phenomena where lexical, semantic, and pragmatic information intersect, and is a ca...
Frontiers in Psychology, 2021
Upon hearing “Some of Michelangelo’s sculptures are in Rome,” adults can easily generate a scalar implicature and infer that the intended meaning of the utterance corresponds to “Some but not all Michelangelo’s sculptures are in Rome.” Comprehension experiments show that preschoolers struggle with this kind of inference until at least 5 years of age. Surprisingly, the few studies having investigated children’s production of scalar expressions like some and all suggest that production is adult-like already in their third year of life. Thus, children’s production of implicatures seems to develop at least 2 years before their comprehension of implicatures. In this paper, we present a novel account of scalar implicature generation in the framework of Bidirectional Optimality Theory: the Asymmetry Account. We show that the production–comprehension asymmetry is predicted to emerge because the comprehension of some requires the hearer to consider the speaker’s perspective, but the producti...
2021
Preschoolers struggle with Scalar Implicature (SI) generation, showing difficulties in interpreting the scalar element “some” with its upper-bounded meaning “some but not all”. Strikingly, despite the fact that the comprehension of “some” is not adult-like until at least 5 years of age, recent corpus data suggest that children, in production, can use “some” as “not all” already in their third year of life. In this paper, we propose the Asymmetry Account, an account of SI generation formulated in the framework of Bidirectional Optimality Theory (Bi-OT). By taking Bi-OT as a model of language use, we show that the comprehension of “some” requires hearers’ to consider the speaker’s perspective, but not vice versa: to produce “some” with its upper-bounded meaning no mentalizing about other perspectives is needed. In light of this, we predict that the comprehension of weak scalar elements such as “some” is cognitively more demanding than their production and argue that children’s difficu...
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 implicatures: experiments at the semantics- pragmatics interface
In this article we present two sets of experiments designed to investigate the acquisition of scalar implicatures. Scalar implicatures arise in examples like Some professors are famous where the speaker's use of some typically indicates that s/he had reasons not to use a more informative term, e.g. all. Some professors are famous therefore gives rise to the implicature that not all professors are famous. Recent studies on the development of pragmatics suggest that preschool children are often insensitive to such implicatures when they interpret scalar terms (Cognition 78 raises two important questions: (a) are all scalar terms treated in the same way by young children?, and (b) does the child's difficulty reflect a genuine inability to derive scalar implicatures or is it due to demands imposed by the experimental task on an otherwise pragmatically savvy child? Experiment 1 addresses the first question by testing a group of 30 5-year-olds and 30 adults (all native speakers of Greek) on three different scales, koli, merikil (kall, somel), ktris, diol (kthree, twol) and kteliono, arxizol (kfinish, startl). In each case, subjects were presented with contexts which satisfied the semantic content of the stronger (i.e. more informative) terms on each scale (i.e. all, three and finish) but were described using the weaker terms of the scales (i.e. some, two, start). We found that, while adults overwhelmingly rejected these infelicitous descriptions, children almost never did so. Children also differed from adults in that their rejection rate on the numerical scale was reliably higher than on the two other scales. In order to address question (b), we trained a group of 30 5-yearolds to detect infelicitous statements. We then presented them with modified versions of the stories A. Papafragou, J. Musolino / Cognition 86 (2003) 253-282 253 Cognition 86 (2003) 253-282 www.elsevier.com/locate/cognit 0010-0277/02/$ -see front matter q (A. Papafragou).
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.