No abstract

This study investigates the implications of language-specific constraints on linguistic event encoding for the description and on-line inspection of causative events. English-speaking and Greek-speaking adults, 3-year-olds, and 4-year-olds viewed and described causative events, which are composed of Means and Result subevents, in an eyetracking study. The results demonstrate cross-linguistic differences in the informational content of causative event descriptions: Greek speakers across age groups were more likely than English speakers to mention only one causative subevent. Developmental changes in the tendency to encode information about causative events in language were also evident: in both language groups, adults were more likely than children to mention both Means and Result subevents. Finally, for both adult and child speakers of both languages, preparing different types of event descriptions changed the way that events were visually inspected, shifting attention toward to-be-encoded subevents. These findings offer some of the first evidence about the development of the language production system, the attentional mechanisms that it employs, and its workings in speakers of different languages.

Containment and support have traditionally been assumed to represent universal conceptual foundations for spatial terms. This assumption can be challenged, however: English in and on are applied across a surprisingly broad range of exemplars, and comparable terms in other languages show significant variation in their application. We propose that the broad domains of both containment and support have internal structure that reflects different subtypes, that this structure is reflected in basic spatial term usage across languages, and that it constrains children's spatial term learning. Using a newly developed battery, we asked how adults and 4-year-old children speaking English or Greek distribute basic spatial terms across subtypes of containment and support. We found that containment showed similar distributions of basic terms across subtypes among all groups while support showed such similarity only among adults, with striking differences between children learning English versus Greek. We conclude that the two domains differ considerably in the learning problems they present, and that learning in and on is remarkably complex. Together, our results point to the need for a more nuanced view of spatial term learning.

Preschoolers often struggle to compute scalar implicatures involving disjunction (or), in which they are required to strengthen an utterance by negating stronger alternatives, e.g. to infer that, ‘The girl has an apple or an orange’ likely means she does not have both. However, recent reports surprisingly find that a substantial subset of children interpret disjunction as conjunction, concluding instead that the girl must have both fruits. According to these studies, children arrive at conjunctive readings not because they have a non-adult-like semantics, but because they lack access to the stronger scalar alternative and, and employ doubly exhaustified disjuncts when computing implicatures. Using stimuli modelled on previous studies, we test English-speaking preschoolers and replicate the finding that many children interpret or conjunctively. However, we speculate that conditions which replicate this finding may be pragmatically infelicitous, such that results do not offer a valid test of children’s semantic competence. We show that when disjunctive statements are uttered in contexts that render the speaker’s intended question more transparent, conjunctive readings disappear almost entirely.

We review experimental evidence regarding the development of scalar implicature in children. Scalar implicatures are inferences that arise when utterances like “Mary ate some of the cakes” are interpreted as “Mary ate some but not all of the cakes.” The evidence suggests that, even though the mechanism for generating scalar implicatures in children is in many respects adult-like, children nevertheless face limitations in computing such conversational inferences from what the speaker said. We highlight the importance of the findings for the development of pragmatic inference, language acquisition, and communication in general. We also identify open questions and promising areas for future research.