A Developmental Investigation of Processing Costs in Implicature Production

Abstract

Much developmental work has been devoted to scalar implicatures. These are implicitly communicated propositions linked to relatively weak terms (consider how Some pragmatically implies Not all) that are more likely to be carried out by adults than by children. Children tend to retain the linguistically encoded meaning of these terms (wherein Some is compatible with All). In three experiments, we gauge children's performance with scalars while investigating four factors that can have an effect on implicature production: (i) the role of (the presence or absence of) distractor items; (ii) the nature of the task (verbal judgments versus action-based judgments); (iii) the choice of scalar expression (the French quantifier quelques versus certains); and (iv) the type of scale that contextualizes the weak utterance (the affirmative All versus the negative None earlier findings showing that 9-year-olds are more likely than adults to consider as true statements such as Some turtles are in the boxes (uttered when all turtles are in the boxes) while employing the quantifier certains in a truth evaluation task containing multiple distractor items. The task in Experiment 2 increased implicature production across all ages (4-, 5-, and 7-year-olds as well as adults) but maintained the developmental effect while using quelques in an action-based task containing no distractor items. Experiment 3 showed that 9-year-olds are more likely to produce implicatures with quelques than they are with certains in the action task while adults are not affected by the choice of term. Overall, these results identify seemingly harmless task features that can prevent even older children (9-year-olds) from carrying out implicatures (e.g., through the inclusion of distractors) while also showing how implicature production among even young children (4-to 5-year-olds) can be facilitated by task features (e.g., the use of an action task) and without the introduction of special training.

Quantity implicature and access to scalar alternatives in language acquisition

“…Besides showing that children have difficulty generating relevant alternatives for scales like some, all , these data also suggest that, contrary to speculation in the literature (e.g., Chierchia et al 2001;Pouscoulous et al 2007;Reinhart 2004), children's difficulties are not straightforwardly attributable to limitations of working memory, task demand, or other types of processing constraints. In our study, we found that children were perfectly capable of deriving strengthened interpretations for utterances that involved contextual alternatives, but failed for identical sentences that involved some.…”

“…Previous studies have suggested various factors that might affect children's derivation of implicatures, including limitations on working memory, limited understanding of context and meta-linguistic tasks, and the salience or availability of relevant scalar alternatives (see Chierchia et al 2001;Musolino 2006;Musolino & Lidz 2006;Papafragou 2006;Papafragou & Musolino 2003;Papafragou & Tantalou, 2002;Pouscoulous et al 2007). According to Papafragou and Musolino, since each of these factors might limit children's computation of implicatures, and since children readily assign exact interpretations to numerals, children must not be using implicatures to derive exact meanings of numerals.…”

“…Instead, the claim is only that implicatures are not immediate (and therefore, by these accounts, not part of the literal semantics). Studies that attribute children's problems to processing limits (e.g., Chierchia et al 2001;Reinhart 2004;Pouscoulous et al 2007) do not actually assess working memory or processing capacity, and therefore do not test whether individual differences in capacity predict differences in pragmatic abilities. 2 Also, these studies do not provide a model of how processing limits, per se, could generate the effects found -i.e., which specific processes are affected and how.…”

“…Children may know how to determine a winner in such contexts without actually thinking that three can be assigned a weak interpretation of "at least three." 2 The evidence from Pouscoulous et al 2007 for a processing cost comes from the observation that some tasks (i.e., creating a set) are more likely to elicit adult behaviour than others (i.e., truth value judgment), and that some lexical items are used in more complex syntactic constructions (like the partitive). However, the studies fail to test whether the tasks or words used actually differ in their demands on processing, or how such a processing limit would explain the findings (i.e., which processes were limited, and how).…”

Pragmatic Inferences in High-Functioning Adults with Autism and Asperger Syndrome

“…When presented with underinformative sentences like ''Some giraffes have long necks'', 89% of the children in Noveck's study answered that this statement is true (logical/literal interpretation), while only 41% of the adults responded true. Other developmental studies have confirmed the finding that children do not derive scalar implicatures to the same extent as adults do, even when given more explicit instructions, a training session or acting out tasks that do not require real world knowledge and which are easier for children (Guasti et al 2005;Papafragou and Musolino 2003;Pouscoulous et al 2007). The finding that children's performance improved when manipulating experimental conditions, suggests that it is not merely pragmatic competence as such that is lacking in children, and that limited cognitive resources may be part of the explanation.…”