Ad-hoc pragmatic implicatures among Shipibo-Konibo children in the Peruvian Amazon

Abstract

Pragmatic reasoning – the ability to infer the intended meaning of an utterance in context – is one of the core aspects of language comprehension. Yet classic linguistic accounts of pragmatics may not apply as consistently in non-WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) contexts. Children’s ability to reason pragmatically increases across childhood in U.S. and European communities. Ad hoc (contextual) implicatures tend to emerge around age four, but this pattern has not been studied cross-culturally. We conducted a study of the development of ad-hoc implicatures in Shipibo-Konibo communities in the Peruvian Amazon – a culture with a holistic orientation that might be expected to lead to a decrease in the felicity of implicatures, inferences which typically lead to restrictions on context. While 8–10 year-olds successfully made these implicatures, younger children did not, despite successfully understanding control trials. These findings suggest that ad-hoc implicatures are available interpretations, even in a community with different cultural expectations, but that their development may be more protracted.

How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words

“…Substantial variation is much more likely. Studies on children's pragmatic inferences in different cultures have documented both similar 76,77 and different 78 developmental trajectories. Nevertheless, our model provides a way to think about how to reconcile cross-cultural variation with a shared cognitive architecture: we predict differences in how sensitive children are to the individual information sources at different ages but similarities in how information is integrated 7 .…”

The Pervasive Role of Pragmatics in Early Language

“…While the anthropological literature has hinted at differences in which and how pragmatic inferences are computed across cultures (Harris, 1996;Le Guen, 2018), developmental work on how culture influences early communication or linguistic pragmatics is still rare (cf. Fortier, Kellier, Flecha, & Frank, 2018;Liszkowski, et al, 2012;Salomo & Liszkowski, 2013;Zhao, Zhou, Ren, & Frank, in prep) . In principle, the modeling framework we presented offers a straightforward way to incorporate cross-cultural (and also interindividual) variation by assuming a universal model structure with a differential weighing of different information sources.…”

Children's interpretation of ambiguous pronouns based on prior discourse

“…Regarding the first point, Frank and colleagues (2016) found similar results when children were tested in a communication task either on a tablet or in a live interaction. Regarding the second point, there are relatively few cross-cultural developmental studies on pragmatic inference, with some finding similar (Zhao, Ren, Frank, & Zhou, 2019) and others different (Fortier, Kellier, Flecha, & Frank, 2018) trajectories compared to western, affluent settings.…”

“…Regarding the second point, the cross-cultural generalizability of experimental pragmatics of the type we studied here is an open challenge for future research. While some semantic/pragmatic phenomena do appear to be general (Katsos et al, 2016), there are relatively few cross-cultural developmental studies on inference specifically, with some finding similar (Su, 2013;Su & Su, 2015;Zhao et al, 2019) and others different (Fortier et al, 2018) trajectories compared to western settings.…”