Children’s derivation of scalar implicatures: Alternatives and relevance

Skordos, Dimitrios; Papafragou, Anna

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2016.04.006

Cited by 150 publications

(153 citation statements)

References 30 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

130

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Developmental data suggest that children have difficulty generating scalar implicatures (e.g. Huang & Snedeker, 2009b;Noveck, 2001;Papafragou & Musolino, 2003) and there is now converging evidence that at least part of the reason is children's difficulty in generating appropriate alternatives (Barner, Brooks, & Bale, 2011;Chierchia, Crain, Guasti, Gualmini, & Meroni, 2001;Gualmini et al, 2001;Skordos & Papafragou, 2016).…”

Section: Alternatives In Scalar Implicaturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The role of alternative salience in the derivation of scalar implicatures

Rees

Bott

2018

Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Comprehension can be enriched by considering what a speaker could have said but did not; namely, the alternative. For example, "Betty passed some of her exams" can be interpreted as "Betty passed some but not all of her exams". This enriched interpretation is an example of a scalar implicature. We consider whether the salience and use of the alternative are independent processes in the derivation of scalar implicatures or whether use is dependent on salience. Participants completed three sentence interpretation experiments in which the sentences invited scalar implicatures. The experiments used a structural priming paradigm with alternatives and implicatures as primes. We found that (1) adults could be primed to derive scalar implicatures when the alternative was the prime (2) they did so at a rate equal to if the scalar implicature itself were the prime. In the absence of evidence that the use of the alternative can be primed independently of its salience, we conclude that salience and use are not independent processes. Instead, we suggest that when the alternative is sufficiently salient, the implicature will automatically be derived.

show abstract

Section: Alternatives In Scalar Implicaturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A particularly convincing example of this is Skordos and Papafragou (2016). They tested whether the accessibility and relevance of alternatives affected five-year-old's ability to generate scalar implicatures.…”

Section: Alternatives In Scalar Implicaturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of alternative salience in the derivation of scalar implicatures

Rees

Bott

2018

Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Critically, we adopted a within-subjects paradigm in which children observed and e280 Gweon and Asaba rated two teachers sequentially: a fully informative teacher and an underinformative teacher, in two different orders. Given the effect of prior exposure to better alternative scalar items in evaluating pragmatically underinformative utterances (Skordos & Papafragou, 2016), this within-subjects design allowed us to explore the possibility that young children's evaluations of an underinformative teacher are affected by their prior experiences with a fully informative teacher. Acknowledging limitations of using binary measures in assessing children's pragmatic competence (Katsos & Bishop, 2011), we used a continuous, multipoint scale following Gweon et al (2014) so that children could provide graded evaluations for each teacher.…”

Section: Development Of Children's Ability To Draw Pragmatic Implicaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Order Matters: Children's Evaluation of Underinformative Teachers Depends on Context

Gweon

Asaba

2017

Child Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The ability to evaluate "sins of omission"-true but pragmatically misleading, underinformative pedagogy-is critical for learning. This study reveals a developmental change in children's evaluation of underinformative teachers and investigates the nature of their limitations. Participants rated a fully informative teacher and an underinformative teacher in two different orders. Six- and 7-year-olds (N = 28) successfully distinguished the teachers regardless of the order (Experiment 1), whereas 4- and 5-year-olds (N = 82) succeeded only when the fully informative teacher came first (Experiments 2 and 3). After seeing both teachers, 4-year-olds (N = 32) successfully preferred the fully informative teacher (Experiment 4). These results are discussed in light of developmental work in pragmatic implicature, suggesting that young children might struggle with spontaneously generating relevant alternatives for evaluating underinformative pedagogy.

show abstract

“…(This is to say nothing of the intense focus on SIs in adult psycholinguistic studies, which we do not review here.) Researchers around the globe have investigated whether children are able to calculate such implicatures (Noveck 2001), and if so, whether their ability to do so depends on the lexical items featured in the experiment (Papafragou & Musolino 2003;Hurewitz et al 2006;Pouscoulous et al 2007), the nature of scalar implicature being targeted (Papafragou & Tantalou 2004;Barner et al 2011;Stiller et al 2015), the amount of contextual and pragmatic support for implicature calculation (Papafragou & Musolino 2003;Guasti et al 2005), the type of judgment children are permitted to provide and the type of task administered (Miller et al 2005;Katsos & Bishop 2011;Foppolo et al 2012;Syrett et al in press), whether children are given evidence for the importance of contrasting scalar alternatives within an experimental session (Vargas-Tokuda, Gutiérrez-Rexach & Grinstead 2008;Foppolo et al 2012;Skordos & Papafragou 2016;Syrett et al in press) and whether implicature calculation is delayed relative to the generation of semantic material (Huang & Snedeker 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Differences between Spanish monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual children in their calculation of entailment-based scalar implicatures

Syrett

Lingwall

Perez-Cortes

et al. 2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this paper, we extend investigations of the possible effects of cross-linguistic influence at the pragmatics-syntax interface (Hulk & Müller 2000; Müller & Hulk 2001; Serratrice, Sorace & Paoli 2004), by presenting two experiments designed to probe how Spanish monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual preschool-age children approach the ‘some, but not all’ scalar implicature (SI) associated with algunos (‘some’). We compare algunos and unos (also a ‘some’ indefinite, but one that is not context-linked and does not induce an SI), and algunos and todos (the universal quantifier ‘every/all’). The performance of the children is compared to fluent adult Spanish heritage speakers. Experiment 1 is a variation of Noveck’s (2001) statement evaluation task, also replicated by Guasti et al. (2005). Experiment 2 is a forced-choice picture selection task. Results demonstrate that adults were the only group to consistently calculate the SI associated with algunos – a finding that was expected to some extent, given that our tasks were stripped of the contextual support that could benefit children’s pragmatic reasoning. While bilingual and monolingual children displayed comparable performance across tasks, bilinguals in Experiment 2 appeared to experience difficulty with judgments related to todos – a pattern we attribute (in light of independent findings) to the cognitive overload in the task, not the lexical entry of this quantifier. We conclude that young monolingual and bilingual children confront the same challenges when called upon to deploy pragmatic skills in a discourse context.This article is part of the special collection: Acquisition of Quantification

show abstract

Children’s derivation of scalar implicatures: Alternatives and relevance

Cited by 150 publications

References 30 publications

The role of alternative salience in the derivation of scalar implicatures

The role of alternative salience in the derivation of scalar implicatures

Order Matters: Children's Evaluation of Underinformative Teachers Depends on Context

Differences between Spanish monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual children in their calculation of entailment-based scalar implicatures

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About