The Role of Task Characteristics in Children's Scalar Implicature Production
نویسندگان
چکیده
In two experiments, we aimed to show the importance of task characteristics in scalar implicature production. In Experiment 1, we found that five-year-olds were significantly more pragmatic when given an Action-Based Task (ABT), in which they had to respond by performing an action than in a Truth-Value Judgement Task (TVJT), in which they had to evaluate the truth-value of statements. Experiment 2 showed that seven-year-olds were almost exclusively pragmatic on the same ABT and TVJT used in Experiment 1. However, we found a 22% drop in pragmatic responses when the TVJT contained world-knowledge statements (rather than statements about simple objects such as marbles). Together, these two experiments provide evidence that not only the nature of the task, but also its specific content is crucial in determining the extent to which young children produce scalar implicatures.
منابع مشابه
Accessing the unsaid: the role of scalar alternatives in children's pragmatic inference.
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 pictu...
متن کاملPragmatic tolerance: Implications for the acquisition of informativeness and implicature
Recent investigations of the acquisition of scalar implicature report that young children do not reliably reject a sentence with a weak scalar term, e.g. 'some of the books are red', when it is used as a description of a situation where a stronger statement is true, e.g. where all the books are red. This is taken as evidence that children do not interpret the sentence with the implicature that ...
متن کاملElectrophysiology of Pragmatic Processing: Exploring the Processing Cost of the Scalar Implicature in the Truth-Value Judgment Task
Most theoretical as well as empirical work regarding the scalar implicature not all of the quantifier some has focused on the controversy of whether this implicature is generated by default or based on context. Independently of this question, it can be also asked whether this scalar implicature contributes to the truth-conditional content of sentences. We present results of an ERP study which t...
متن کاملWhen some is not every: dissociating scalar implicature generation and mismatch.
Making inferences beyond the literal meaning of sentences occurs with certain scalar expressions via scalar implicatures. For example, adults usually interpret some as some but not all. On the basis of behavioral research, it has been suggested that processing implicatures is cognitively costly. However, many studies have used cases where sentences with some did not match the context in which t...
متن کاملReflections on Jennifer Saul's View of Successful Communication and Conversational Implicature
Saul (2002) criticizes a view on the relationship between speaker meaning and conversational implicatures according to which speaker meaning is exhaustively comprised of what is said and what is implicated. In the course of making her points, she develops a couple of new notions which she calls “utterer-implicature” and “audience-implicature”. She then makes certain claims about the relationshi...
متن کامل