Preschool logic: truth and felicity in the acquisition of quantification (original) (raw)

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):

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: 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).

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).

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 Interpretation of Sentences Containing Multiple Scalar Terms

J. Semant., 2022

Sentences containing the scalar term “some”, such as “The pig carried some of his rocks”, are usually interpreted as conveying the scalar inference that the pig did not carry all of his rocks. Previous research has reported that when interpreting such sentences, children tend to derive fewer of these scalar inferences than adults (Noveck 2001; Papafragou and Musolino 2003; Guasti et al. 2005, among others). One approach to explaining these results contends that children have difficulties accessing the alternative sentences involved in the derivation of such scalar inferences. This ‘Alternatives-based’ approach raises the possibility that children’s performance may improve if certain scalar terms are presented together in the same sentence, for example, if a sentence contains both an existential quantifier and a universal quantifier, as in “Every pig carried some of his rocks”. Such ‘EverySome’ sentences have been associated with the inference that not every pig carried all of his ro...

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 ...

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)

Some Pieces Are Missing: Implicature Production in Children

Frontiers in Psychology

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.