Children's Knowledge of Free Choice Inferences and Scalar Implicatures

Tieu, Lyn; Romoli, Jacopo; Zhou, Peng; Crain, Stephen

doi:10.1093/jos/ffv001

Cited by 79 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…There are also a variety of challenges for this approach stemming from certain differences between implicatures and free choice in their processing and acquisition profiles (Chemla and Bott 2014;Tieu et al 2016). Other challenges stem from the interaction between free choice and presuppositions (Romoli and Santorio 2019;Marty and Romoli 2019) and the status of positive versus negative sentences in certain contexts (Tieu et al 2018).…”

Section: (19)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Choice and prohibition in non-monotonic contexts

2020

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Disjunctions in the scope of possibility modals give rise to a conjunctive inference, generally referred to as 'free choice.' For example, Emma can take Spanish or Calculus suggests that Emma can take Spanish and can take Calculus. This inference is not valid on standard semantics for modals in combination with a Boolean semantics for disjunction. Hence free choice has sparked a whole industry of theories in philosophy of language and semantics. This paper investigates free choice in sentences involving a non-monotonic modified numeral, under which we embed a possibility modal scoping over disjunction. One example is Exactly one student can(not) take Spanish or Calculus. As we point out, the presence (or absence) of certain readings of these sentences is a key test for a prominent approach, which analyzes free choice as a kind of scalar implicature. We report on two experiments investigating the readings of such sentences, using an inferential task. Our results are challenging for the implicature approach. We sketch two possible solutions within this approach, either adopting a different recent implicature algorithm, or exploring a different meaning for modified numerals with exactly. Both of them suffer from a variety of problems. We then discuss a third solution, which exploits a recent account of free choice based on homogeneity. This approach can account for our results, in combination with plausible assumptions about homogeneity projection, though it too has open issues with related cases. Regardless of which solution is chosen, non-monotonic contexts turn out to be an important test case for theories of free choice, implicature, and modified numerals.

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Section: (19)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Choice and prohibition in non-monotonic contexts

2020

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“…Finally, the hypothesis that children can compute implicatures not involving lexical retrieval of alternatives is elaborated upon by Tieu et al (2015b), who show that children are capable of computing free choice inferences. A sentence containing the modal is allowed to and disjunction, such as (17a), for example, gives rise to the free choice inference in (17b), according to which Jack has free choice between the two options.…”

Section: On the Role Of Alternatives In Children's Implicaturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Jack is allowed to have ice cream and Jack is allowed to have cake Crucially, the alternatives that we need to negate correspond to the (pre-exhaustified) disjuncts of the original assertion, so children do not need to perform any lexical replacements or retrieve any alternatives from the lexicon. Zhou et al (2013) and Tieu et al (2015b) tested 4-and 5-year-old children's comprehension of free choice inferences, and found that children were successful at rejecting free choice statements in contexts where only one of the disjuncts was true, e.g., when Jack was only allowed to have ice cream. While they failed to compute classical scalar implicatures involving or /and and might/must, their performance on free choice inferences was adult-like.…”

Section: On the Role Of Alternatives In Children's Implicaturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Role of Alternatives in the Acquisition of Simple and Complex Disjunctions in French and Japanese

et al. 2016

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When interpreting disjunctive sentences of the form 'A or B,' young children have been reported to differ from adults in two ways. First, children have been reported to interpret disjunction inclusively rather than exclusively, accepting 'A or B' in contexts in which both A and B are true (Gualmini, Crain, Meroni, Chierchia & Guasti 2001; Chierchia, Crain, Guasti & Thornton 2001). Second, some children have been reported to interpret disjunction conjunctively, rejecting 'A or B' in contexts in which only one of the disjuncts is true (

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“…Additionally, Barner et al () argument that 4‐year‐olds compute scalar implicatures in the absence of epistemic reasoning hinges on the assumption that the ignorance implicature task in which children fail is minimally different (and only in terms of epistemic computations) from the ad hoc scalar implicature task that children pass. However, the differences may not be minimal; children have been shown to struggle with disjunction (Singh, Wexler, Astle‐Rahim, Kamawar, & Fox, ; although see Tieu, Romoli, Zhou, & Crain, ), and it may not be clear to children that the ignorant speaker (who is blindfolded) would have enough information to produce even a disjunctive statement (‘He took a carrot or a banana’). Thus, the question of whether children can incorporate speaker perspective into scalar implicature derivation needs to be examined further.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Four‐year‐olds incorporate speaker knowledge into pragmatic inferences

Kampa

Papafragou

2019

Developmental Science

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Human communication relies on the ability to take into account the speaker's mental state to infer the intended meaning of an utterance in context. For example, a sentence such as 'Some of the animals are safe to pet' can be interpreted as giving rise to the inference 'Some and not all animals are safe to pet' when uttered by an expert. The same inference, known as a scalar implicature, does not arise when the sentence is spoken by someone with partial knowledge. Adults have been shown to derive scalar implicatures in accordance with the speaker's knowledge state, but in young children this ability is debated. Here, we revisit this question using a simple visual world paradigm. We find that both 4-and 5-year-olds successfully incorporate speaker knowledge into the derivation of scalar inferences. However, this ability does not generalize immediately to non-linguistic communicative contexts. These findings have important implications for the development of pragmatic abilities. K E Y W O R D S epistemic, Grice, language acquisition, non-linguistic communication, pragmatics, scalar implicature

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Children's Knowledge of Free Choice Inferences and Scalar Implicatures

Cited by 79 publications

References 28 publications

Choice and prohibition in non-monotonic contexts

Choice and prohibition in non-monotonic contexts

On the Role of Alternatives in the Acquisition of Simple and Complex Disjunctions in French and Japanese

Four‐year‐olds incorporate speaker knowledge into pragmatic inferences

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