Some Pieces Are Missing: Implicature Production in Children (original) (raw)

Abstract

Until at least 4 years of age, children, unlike adults, interpret some as compatible with all. The inability to draw the pragmatic inference leading to interpret some as not all, could be taken to indicate a delay in pragmatic abilities, despite evidence of other early pragmatic skills. However, little is known about how the production of these implicature develops. We conducted a corpus study on early production and perception of the scalar term some in British English. Children's utterances containing some were extracted from the dense corpora of five children aged 2;00 to 5;01 (N = 5,276), and analysed alongside a portion of their caregivers' utterances with some (N = 9,030). These were coded into structural and contextual categories allowing for judgments on the probability of a scalar implicature being intended. The findings indicate that children begin producing and interpreting implicatures in a pragmatic way during their third year of life, shortly after they first produce some. Their production of some implicatures is low but matches their parents' input in frequency. Interestingly, the mothers' production of implicatures also increases as a function of the children's age. The data suggest that as soon as they acquire some, children are fully competent in its production and mirror adult production. The contrast between the very early implicature production we find and the relatively late implicature comprehension established in the literature calls for an explanation; possibly in terms of the processing cost of implicature derivation. Additionally, some is multifaceted, and thus, implicatures are infrequent, and structurally and contextually constrained in both populations.

Loading...

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

References (76)

  1. Ambridge, B., Kidd, E., Rowland, C. F., and Theakston, A. L. (2015). The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition. J. Child Lang. 42, 239-273. doi: 10.1017/s030500091400049x
  2. Bagassi, M., D'Addario, M., Macchi, L., and Sala, V. (2009). Children's acceptance of underinformative sentences: the case of some as a determiner. Think. Reason. 15, 211-235. doi: 10.1080/13546780902864306
  3. Barner, D., Brooks, N., and Bale, A. (2011). Accessing the unsaid: the role of scalar alternatives in children's pragmatic inference. Cognition 118, 84-93. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.10.010
  4. Barner, D., Brooks, N., and Bale, A. C. (2010). Quantity implicature and access to scalar alternatives in language acquisition. Semant. Linguist. Theor. 20, 525-543. doi: 10.3765/salt.v20i0.2571
  5. Barner, D., Chow, K., and Yang, S.-J. (2009). Finding one's meaning: a test of the relation between quantifiers and integers in language development. Cogn. Psychol. 58, 195-219. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2008.07.001
  6. Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., and Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed- effects models using lme4. J. Stat. Softw. 67, 1-48. doi: 10.18637/jss.v067.i01
  7. Bergen, L., and Grodner, D. J. (2012). Speaker knowledge influences the comprehension of pragmatic inferences. J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn. 38, 1450. doi: 10.1037/a0027850
  8. Berger, F., and Höhle, B. (2012). Restrictions on addition: children's interpretation of the focus particles auchalso and nur only in German. J. Child Lang. 39, 383-410. doi: 10.1017/S0305000911000122
  9. Bernicot, J., Laval, V., and Chaminaud, S. (2007). Nonliteral language forms in children: in what order are they acquired in pragmatics and metapragmatics? J. Pragmatics 39, 2115-2132. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2007.05.009
  10. Bloom, P. (2000). How Children Learn the Meanings of Words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  11. Bott, L., Bailey, T. M., and Grodner, D. (2012). Distinguishing speed from accuracy in scalar implicatures. J. Mem. Lang. 66, 123-142. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2011.09.005
  12. Bott, L., and Noveck, I. A. (2004). Some utterances are underinformative: the onset and time course of scalar inferences. J. Mem. Lang. 51, 437-457. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2004.05.006
  13. Braine, M. D., and Rumain, B. (1981). Development of comprehension of or: evidence for a sequence of competencies. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 31, 46-70.
  14. Breheny, R., Katsos, N., and Williams, J. (2006). Are generalised scalar implicatures generated by default? An on-line investigation into the role of context in generating pragmatic inferences. Cognition 100, 434-463. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2005.07.003
  15. Breheny, R. E. (forthcoming). "Scalar implicatures in a gricean cognitive system, " in Handbook of Experimental Pragmatics, eds N. Katsos and C. Cummins (Oxford University Press).
  16. Cameron-Faulkner, T., Lieven, E., and Theakston, A. (2007). What part of no do children not understand? A usage-based account of multiword negation. J. Child Lang. 34, 251. doi: 10.1017/s0305000906007884
  17. Chierchia, G. (2004). "Scalar implicatures, polarity phenomena, and the syntax/pragmatics interface, " in Structures and Beyond, Vol. 3, ed A. Belletti (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press), 39-103.
  18. Chierchia, G. (2006). Broaden your views: implicatures of domain widening and the logicality? of language. Linguist. Inquiry 37, 535-590. doi: 10.1162/ling.2006.37.4.535
  19. Chierchia, G., Fox, D., and Spector, B. (2012). "The grammatical view of scalar implicatures and the relationship between semantics and pragmatics, " in An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, Vol. 3, eds P. Portner, C. Maienborn and K. von Heusinger (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter), 2297-2332.
  20. Clark, E. V. (2016). First Language Acquisition, 3rd Edn. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  21. Davies, C., and Katsos, N. (2010). Over-informative children: production/comprehension asymmetry or tolerance to pragmatic violations? Lingua 120, 1956-1972. doi: 10.1016/j.lingua.2010.02.005
  22. De Neys, W., and Schaeken, W. (2007). When people are more logical under cognitive load: Dual task impact on scalar implicature. Exp. Psychol. 54, 128-133. doi: 10.1027/1618-3169.54.2.128
  23. De Ruiter, L., Theakston, A., Brandt, S., and Lieven, E. (2017). "The relationship between parental input and children's spontaneous use of adverbial clauses containing after, before, because, " in Poster Presented at the14th International Congress for the Study of Child Language (IASCL), July 17-21 (Lyon).
  24. Degen, J. (2015). Investigating the distribution of some (but not all) implicatures using corpora and web-based methods. Semant. Pragmatics 8, 1-55. doi: 10.3765/sp.8.11
  25. Degen, J., and Tanenhaus, M. K. (2011). "Making inferences: the case of scalar implicature processing, " in 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society, 3299-3304.
  26. Degen, J., and Tanenhaus, M. K. (2015). Processing scalar implicature: a constraint- based approach. Cogn. Sci. 39, 667-710. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12171
  27. Falkum, I. L., Recasens, M., and Clark, E. V. (2017). The moustache sits down first?: on the acquisition of metonymy. J. Child Lang. 44, 87-119. doi: 10.1017/S0305000915000720
  28. Feeney, A., Scrafton, S., Duckworth, A., and Handley, S. J. (2004). The story of some: everyday pragmatic inference by children and adults. Can. J. Exp. Psychol. 58, 121. doi: 10.1037/h0085792
  29. Fenson, L., Dale, P. S., Reznick, J. S., Bates, E., Thal, D. J., Pethick, S. J., et al. (1994). Variability in early communicative development. Monogr. Soc. Res. Child Dev. 59, 1-173; discussion 174-185. doi: 10.2307/1166093
  30. Foppolo, F., Guasti, M. T., and Chierchia, G. (2012). Scalar implicatures in child language: Give children a chance. Lang. Learn. Dev. 8, 365-394. doi: 10.1080/15475441.2011.626386
  31. Geurts, B. (2010). Quantity Implicatures. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511975158
  32. Grice, H. P. (1957). Meaning. Philos. Rev. 66, 377-388.
  33. Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  34. Guasti, M. T., Chierchia, G., Crain, S., Foppolo, F., Gualmini, A., and Meroni, L. (2005). Why children and adults sometimes (but not always) compute implicatures. Lang. Cogn. Process. 20, 667-696. doi: 10.1080/01690960444000250
  35. Hochstein, L., Bale, A., Fox, D., and Barner, D. (2014). Ignorance and inference: do problems with gricean epistemic reasoning explain childrens difficulty with scalar implicature? J. Semant. 33, 1-29. doi: 10.1093/jos/ffu015
  36. Horn, L. (1984). "Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R-based implicature, " in Meaning, Form, and Use in Context: Linguistic Applications, ed D. Schiffrin (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press), 11-42.
  37. Horn, L. (1989). A Natural History of Negation. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
  38. Horowitz, A. C., Schneider, R. M., and Frank, M. C. (2017). The trouble with quantifiers: exploring children's deficits in scalar implicature. Child Dev. doi: 10.1111/cdev.13014. [Epub ahead of print].
  39. Huang, Y. T,. and Snedeker, J. (2009a). Online interpretation of scalar quantifiers: insight into the semantics-pragmatics interface. Cogn. Psychol. 58, 376-415. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2008.09
  40. Huang, Y. T., and Snedeker, J. (2009b). Semantic meaning and pragmatic interpretation in 5-year-olds: evidence from real-time spoken language comprehension. Dev. Psychol. 45, 1723-1739. doi: 10.1037/a0016704
  41. Huang, Y. T., and Snedeker, J. (2011). Logic and conversation revisited: evidence for a division between semantic and pragmatic content in real-time language comprehension. Lang. Cogn. Process. 26, 1161-1172. doi: 10.1080/01690965.2010.508641
  42. Katsos, N. (2014). "Scalar implicature, " in Pragmatic Development in First Language Acquisition, Vol. 10, ed D. Matthews (Amsterdam; Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company), 183-197.
  43. Katsos, N., and Bishop, D. V. (2011). Pragmatic tolerance: implications for the acquisition of informativeness and implicature. Cognition 120, 67-81. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.02.015
  44. Katsos, N., Cummins, C., Ezeizabarrena, M.-J., Gavarró, A., Kuvac Kuvac Kraljević, J., Hrzica, G., et al. (2016). Cross-linguistic patterns in the acquisition of quantifiers. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 113, 9244-9249. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1601341113
  45. Katsos, N., and Smith, N. (2010). "Pragmatic tolerance and speaker comprehender asymmetries, " in 34th Annual Boston Conference on Language Development, eds K. Franich, K. M. Iserman, and L. L. Keil (Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press), 221-232.
  46. Kidd, E., Brandt, S., Lieven, E. V., and Tomasello, M. (2007). Object relatives made easy: a cross-linguistic comparison of the constraints influencing young children's processing of relative clauses. Lang. Cogn. Process. 22, 860-897. doi: 10.1080/01690960601155284
  47. Kilgarriff, A. (2001). Comparing corpora. Int. J. Corpus Linguist. 6, 97-133. doi: 10.1075/ijcl.6.1.05kil
  48. Kuhn, M. (2013). caret: Classification and Regression Training. R package version 6.0-73. Available online at: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=caret
  49. Landis, J. R. and Koch, G. G. (1977). The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics 33,159.
  50. Levinson, S. C. (2000). Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  51. Lieven, E. V., and Behrens, H. (2012). "Dense sampling, " in Research Methods in Child Language: A Practical Guide, ed E. Hoff (Oxford: Wiley Online Library), 226-239. doi: 10.1002/9781444344035.ch15
  52. Lieven, E. V., Salomo, D., and Tomasello, M. (2009). Two-year-old children's production of multiword utterances: a usage-based analysis. Cogn. Linguist. 20, 481-507. doi: 10.1515/COGL.2009.022
  53. MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: The Database, Vol. 2. New York, NY: Psychology Press.
  54. Noveck, I., Chevallier, C., Chevaux, F., Musolino, J., and Bott, L. (2009). "Children's enrichments of conjunctive sentences in context, " in Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models, eds P. De Brabanter and M. Kissine (Bingley, UK: Emerald Group), 211-234.
  55. Noveck, I., and Sperber, D. (2007). "The why and how of experimental pragmatics: the case of 'scalar inferences' , " in Pragmatics, ed N. Burton-Roberts (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan), 184-212.
  56. Noveck, I. A. (2001). When children are more logical than adults: experimental investigations of scalar implicature. Cognition 78, 165-188. doi: 10.1016/S0010-0277(00)00114-1
  57. Noveck, I. A., and Posada, A. (2003). Characterizing the time course of an implicature: an evoked potentials study. Brain Lang. 85, 203-210. doi: 10.1016/s0093-934x(03)00053-1
  58. Papafragou, A., and Musolino, J. (2003). Scalar implicatures: experiments at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Cognition 86, 253-282. doi: 10.1016/S0010-0277(02)00179-8
  59. Papafragou, A., and Skordos, D. (2016). Scalar Implicature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  60. Paris, S. G. (1973). Comprehension of language connectives and propositional logical relationships. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 16, 278-291.
  61. Pearson, B. Z. (1990). The comprehension of metaphor by preschool children. J. Child Lang. 17, 185-203.
  62. Pouscoulous, N., and Noveck, I. A. (2009). "Going beyond semantics: the development of pragmatic enrichment, " in Language Acquisition, ed S. Foster- Cohen (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan), 196-215.
  63. Pouscoulous, N., Noveck, I. A., Politzer, G., and Bastide, A. (2007). A developmental investigation of processing costs in implicature production. Lang. Acquis. 14, 347-375. doi: 10.1080/1048922070 1600457
  64. R Core Team (2016). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
  65. Reinhart, T. (2004). The processing cost of reference set computation: acquisition of stress shift and focus. Lang. Acquis. 12, 109-155. doi: 10.1207/s15327817la12021
  66. Schulze, C., Grassmann, S., and Tomasello, M. (2013). 3-year-old children make relevance inferences in indirect verbal communication. Child Dev. 84, 2079- 2093. doi: 10.1111/cdev.12093
  67. Siegal, M. and Surian, L. (2004). Conceptual development and conversational understanding. Trends Cogn. Sci. 8, 534-538. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2004. 10.007
  68. Skordos, D., and Papafragou, A. (2016). Childrens derivation of scalar implicatures: alternatives and relevance. Cognition 153, 6-18. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.04.006
  69. Smith, C. L. (1980). Quantifiers and question answering in young children. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 30, 191-205.
  70. Spooren, W. and Degand, L. (2010). Coding coherence relations: reliability and validity. Corpus Linguist. Linguist. Theor. 6, 241-266 doi: 10.1515/cllt.2010.009.
  71. Stiller, A. J., Goodman, N. D., and Frank, M. C. (2014). Ad-hoc implicature in preschool children. Lang. Learn. Dev. 11, 176-190. doi: 10.1080/15475441.2014.927328
  72. Sun, C. (2017). Scalar Implicature: Gricean Reasoning and Local Enrichment. PhD thesis, University College London.
  73. Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Approach to Child Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  74. Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.
  75. Viera, A. J., and Garrett, J. M. (2005). Understanding interobserver agreement: the kappa statistic. Fam. Med., 37, 360-363.
  76. Wilson, E. A. (2017). Childrens Development of Quantity, Relevance and Manner Implicature Understanding and the Role of the Speakers Epistemic State. Ph. D. thesis, University of Cambridge.