Shadow playing with Romanian 5-year-olds. Epistemic adverbs are a kind of magic! (original) (raw)
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The current paper draws light on the acquisition of the semantics and pragmatics of quantifiers embedded under epistemic adverbs in Romanian by means of a novel shadow play paradigm tested on Romanian 5-year-olds and adults. It provides experimental evidence that 5-year-old children derive fewer global implicatures than adults, but that local implicatures triggered are equally infrequent in both groups. The present study is the first one testing quantifiers embedded under epistemic modal operators. Background: There has been much debate in the literature concerning whether/how adult speakers derive local implicatures in embedded contexts, such as (1). (1) Every pig carried some of his rocks. (a) Semantic interpretation: Every pig carried some and possibly all of his rocks. // (b) Global implicature: Not every pig carried all of his rocks.// (c) Local implicature: Every pig carried some but not all of his rocks.
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.
Children's understanding of epistemic modals
Journal of Child Language, 1996
Prior empirical work in semantic development has produced an impressive finding showing that children can reliably detect a modal's relative force (e.g., that must is stronger sounding than may) by five-and-a-half years of age. We investigate the extent to which a representation of relative force can account for an understanding of epistemic modals when their logical meaning is considered (i.e., when modals are interpretable as expressions of necessary and possible conclusions). Experiment 1 presents a replication of Hirst & Weil's hidden-object task, which originally included the supremely forceful indicative is. Thirty-two five-year-olds were required to find a peanut hidden under one of two containers based on a pair of statements that contrasted is with has to, has to with might, or is with might. Half the children were entitled to search for the peanut upon hearing the two statements and half were required to indicate only where they would look. Results largely confirmed the influence of relative force in this paradigm. Both groups of children usually searched under the container associated with the stronger-sounding term. Experiment 2 employed a modified version of the hidden-object task in which contrasts presented one true and one false modal statement and 32 five-year-olds, 20 seven-year-olds, 16 nine-year-olds and 20 adults were asked to determine which of two modal statements was correct. Half the contrasts presented a relatively weaker-sounding modal term in the true statement and the other half presented equally forceful modal terms in the two statements. No age group systematically endorsed a false stronger-sounding modal statement over a true weaker-sounding one. The five-year-olds' rate of correct responding overall was above levels predicted by chance. Mature logical modal understanding was found among seven-year-olds who routinely endorsed a contrast's true modal statement. These findings suggest that deductive inference is an early semantic component of modal terms. 12/31/12 9:33 AM 12/31/12 9:33 AM
Children’s Online Processing of Ad-Hoc Implicatures
Language comprehenders routinely make pragmatic inferences that go beyond the literal meanings of utterances. If A said "I ate some of the cookies," B should infer that A ate some but not all. Children perform poorly on experimental tests of scalar implicatures like this, despite their early-emerging sensitivity to pragmatic cues. Our current work explores potential factors responsible for children's successes and failures in computing pragmatic inferences. In two experiments, we used an eyetracking paradigm to test children's ability to compute implicatures when they have access to contextual alternatives to the target word (Experiment 1), and when they hear prosodic cues that emphasize the contrast between the target and alternative (Experiment 2). We found that by the time children are four years old, they successfully identify the inferential target referent in this paradigm; with supportive prosodic cues, we saw evidence of success in three-year-olds as well. In sum, with sufficient contextual support, preschool children are capable of making online pragmatic inferences.
In learning language, children have to acquire not only words and constructions, but also the ability to make inferences about a speaker's intended meaning. For instance, if in answer to the question, 'what did you put in the bag?', the speaker says, 'I put in a book', then the hearer infers that the speaker put in only a book, by assuming that the speaker is informative. On a Gricean approach to pragmatics, this implicated meaning -a quantity implicature -involves reasoning about the speaker's epistemic state. This thesis examines children's development of implicature understanding. It seeks to address the question of what the relationship is in development between quantity, relevance and manner implicatures; whether word learning by exclusion is a pragmatic forerunner to implicature, or based on a lexical heuristic; and whether reasoning about the speaker's epistemic state is part of children's pragmatic competence. This thesis contributes to research in experimental and developmental pragmatics by broadening the focus of investigation to include different types of implicatures, the relationship between them, and the contribution of other aspects of children's development, including structural language knowledge. It makes the novel comparison of word learning by exclusion with a clearly pragmatic skill -implicatures -and opens an investigation of manner implicatures in development. It also presents new findings suggesting that children's early competence with quantity implicatures in simple communicative situations belies their ongoing development in more complex ones, particularly where the speaker's epistemic state is at stake.
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 on-‐line processing of epistemic modals.
In this paper we investigated the real time processing of epistemic modals in five-year-olds. In a simple reasoning scenario, we presented sentences that minimally vary only for the modal used (might/must) and we compared children’s off-line truth-value judgments with their on-line eye-movements. Consistent with previous research (Noveck 2001), we found that children performed poorly in their truth value judgements. However, their eye movement patterns revealed a very early sensitivity to modal semantics and diverged from the adult controls only at the very end of the sentence. We then discuss the findings in relation with children’s well-know tendency to discard possible outcomes in undetermined reasoning scenario and endorse only one possibility among several (Acredolo & Horobin 1987, Ozturk & Papafragou 2014).
Children's interpretation of referential ambiguities and pragmatic inference
Journal of Child Language, 1984
The verbal responses of 22 second graders, 24 fourth graders and 22 sixth graders to ambiguous and clear messages were recorded. Children's referential choices were analysed. After the ambiguous messages, children (from the age of seven years) chose preferentially a referent with only the feature described in the message rather than a referent with this feature plus another one. The results support the Jackson & Jacobs' hypothesis (1982) that children use an interpretative strategy based on a presupposition about the speaker's cooperation. But the results may also support a hypothesis that children use an information-processing rule not necessarily related to a presupposition about the speaker's cooperation .
Children's acquisition of evidentiality
A question of interest is whether and how the emergence of evidentiality depends on the nature of its cognitive prerequisites. It has been claimed in the literature that the early advantage of concrete over mental/abstract words in the child's lexicon is due to early difficulties with mentalistic concepts (Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997). Following this Conceptual Hypothesis (cf. Smiley & Huttenlocher, 1995), one could argue that the acquisition of evidentiality is delayed because of the complexity and abstractness of the underlying source concepts: to monitor the source for a piece of information, children have to be able to differentiate between the possible events that could lead to beliefs, remember which event took place, and relate that event to a particular belief.. An alternative (perhaps complementary) explanation for the late emergence of mental words (and evidentials) comes from the Mapping Hypothesis (Snedeker & Gleitman, 2004): even if they have acquired the relevant concepts, children may have difficulties discovering the correspondence between these concepts and specific words/morphemes in their language, especially since this correspondence is hard to glean from individual contexts of linguistic use. One way of teasing apart the contribution of conceptual and mapping factors to the acquisition of evidentiality is to conduct non-linguistic tasks of source reasoning with young language learners and compare results from such tasks to children's knowledge of linguistic evidentials. So far non-linguistic source monitoring studies have been conducted with English-speaking children and have produced somewhat mixed results (but see Papafragou et al., in press). These studies show that three-year-olds understand the relationship between seeing and knowing: someone who has not seen an object will not know about that object (Pillow, 1989; Pratt & Bryant, 1990). However, they have difficulty identifying the source of their beliefs (Wimmer, Hogrefe & Perner, 1988). In one study (Gopnik and Graf, 1988), children learned about the contents of a drawer in three different ways (they saw the content of the box, they were told about it or they inferred what is in the box from a clue). Next they were asked how they knew what is in the box. Then children were asked: "How do you know there is an x inside, did you see it, did I tell you about it or did you figure it out from a clue?". Findings show that 3-but not 5-year-olds had difficulty identifying the sources of their beliefs. Moreover, certain types of sources seem to be more difficult for the young children to identify than others: it is especially challenging for young children to identify inference as a source of beliefs before at least before the age of 5 (Sodian & Wimmer, 1987). Other research, however, shows that young children do encode the origins of mental representations to some extent. Three-year-olds' perform better with some sources (e.g., seeing) than with others (e.g., being told). In fact, when asked to report whether their beliefs were due to either seeing or telling, 3-year-olds' performance is well above chance (O'Neill & Gopnik, 1991; Whitcombe & Robinson, 2000).
Children ’ s comprehension of syntactically-encoded evidentiality *
2015
This paper examines children’s acquisition of English copy-raising constructions (henceforth CRCs). These constructions are of particular interest because they encode evidentiality (Asudeh & Toivonen 2012, Rett et al. 2013), which is the implicit citing of the speaker’s source of evidence for an at-issue proposition. A classic example of evidentiality is found in Cuzco Quechua and exemplified below in (1)-(3):