Young children understand some implicatures

Various recent studies have claimed that children have difficulty using contrastive stress in language comprehension (Solan, 1980; Gualmini et al., 2003; McDaniel et al., 1992; Reinhart, 1999, 2004) and that failure to access alternatives generated by focus may create problems for interpreting sentences with only (Paterson et al., 2003). Other researchers have shown that children also have difficulty with scalar implicatures (Noveck 2001, Papafragou and Musolino 2003, Musolino 2004). In this paper we demonstrate that children are correctly able to access a quantity implicature associated with focused some, while correctly not associating such an implicature when some is nonpresuppositional. However, children do not always behave in an adult-like manner, by failing to enforce a scalar implicature with unstressed some in presuppositional contexts.