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

Tieu, Lyn; Yatsushiro, Kazuko; Cremers, Alexandre; Romoli, Jacopo; Sauerland, Uli; Chemla, Emmanuel

doi:10.1093/jos/ffw010

Cited by 20 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Children's troubles with scalar implicatures are not confined solely to quantifiers, however. Developmental work on logical connectives indicates that children also have difficulties computing a scalar implicature with “or” to generate a disjunctive rather than conjunctive interpretation (Singh et al., ; Tieu et al., ; Zhou, Romoli, & Crain, ). Interpreting a statement such as “The girl has a balloon or a ball” as disjunctive requires the listener to draw a scalar implicature that the girl has either a balloon or a ball but does not have both (Singh et al., ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Interpreting a statement such as “The girl has a balloon or a ball” as disjunctive requires the listener to draw a scalar implicature that the girl has either a balloon or a ball but does not have both (Singh et al., ). Children favor inclusive over adult‐like exclusive readings of or in these tasks, not because they don't understand the semantics of “or” in this task, or are unable to compute implicatures, but because they cannot use the full set of alternatives to draw the implicature (Singh et al., ; Tieu et al., ; Zhou et al., ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Four to 5‐year‐old children could reason about ad hoc scales both in a forced‐choice paradigm (Stiller et al., ) and in a truth‐value paradigm (Barner et al., ) when the relevant alternative objects were present in the trial context. Finally, recent work on inferences about disjunction argues that children's struggles are due to failures in generating an adult‐like set of alternatives rather than general semantic or pragmatic deficits (Singh, Wexler, Astle‐Rahim, Kamawar, & Fox, ; Tieu et al., ).…”

Section: Review Of Previous Literature On Children's Comprehension Ofmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Trouble With Quantifiers: Exploring Children's Deficits in Scalar Implicature

2017

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Adults routinely use the context of utterances to infer a meaning beyond the literal semantics of their words (e.g., inferring from "She ate some of the cookies" that she ate some, but not all). Contrasting children's (N = 209) comprehension of scalar implicatures using quantifiers with contextually derived ad hoc implicatures revealed that 4- to 5-year-olds reliably computed ad hoc, but not scalar, implicatures (Experiment 1). Unexpectedly, performance with "some" and "none" was correlated (Experiments 1 and 2). An individual differences study revealed a correlation between quantifier knowledge and implicature success (Experiment 3); a control study ruled out other factors (Experiment 4). These findings suggest that some failures with scalar implicatures may be rooted in a lack of semantic knowledge rather than general pragmatic or processing demands.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Review Of Previous Literature On Children's Comprehension Ofmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Trouble With Quantifiers: Exploring Children's Deficits in Scalar Implicature

2017

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“…Tieu et al observed that children computed free choice inferences around 90% of the time, whereas they computed standard implicatures involving plain disjunction ("or"/"and") and modals ("may"/"must") at typically low rates. In addition to free choice inferences, children have been reported to compute a handful of other inferences at adult-like rates, including the exactly-n inference of numerals (Papafragou & Musolino 2003;Barner & Bachrach 2010), ad hoc implicatures (Barner et al 2011;Stiller et al 2015), ignorance inferences (Hochstein et al 2016), and various inferences of simple and embedded disjunctions (Singh et al 2016;Tieu et al 2017). The apparent variability in children's performance on implicatures (i.e.…”

Section: B ⇝ Jack Can Have Cake and Jack Can Have Ice Creammentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing theories of temporal inferences: Evidence from child language

Cremers

Kane

Tieu

et al. 2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Sentences involving past tense verbs, such as "My dogs were on the carpet", tend to give rise to the inference that the corresponding present tense version, "My dogs are on the carpet", is false. This inference is often referred to as a cessation or temporal inference, and is generally analyzed as a type of implicature. There are two main proposals for capturing this asymmetry: one assumes a difference in informativity between the past and present counterparts (Altshuler & Schwarzschild 2013), while the other proposes a structural difference between the two (Thomas 2012). The two approaches are similar in terms of empirical coverage, but differ in their predictions for language acquisition. Using a novel animated picture selection paradigm, we investigated these predictions. Specifically, we compared the performance of a group of 4-6-year-old children and a group of adults on temporal inferences, scalar implicatures arising from "some", and inferences of adverbial modifiers under negation. The results revealed that overall, children computed all three inferences at a lower rate than adult controls; however they were more adult-like on temporal inferences and inferences of adverbial modifiers than on scalar implicatures. We discuss the implications of the findings, both for a developmental alternatives-based hypothesis (e.g., Barner et al. 2011; Singh et al. 2016; Tieu et al. 2016; 2018), as well as theories of temporal inferences, arguing that the finding that children were more (and equally) adult-like on temporal inferences and adverbial modifiers supports a structural theory of temporal inferences along the lines of Thomas (2012).

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“…Others [11] were concerned with the positive polarity in Japanese. Still others [17] focused on simple and complex disjunctions in French and Japanese, children's interpretation of disjunction in the scope of 'before' [17] and other issues. The authors generally agree that this kind of question is rather difficult and its fullfledged acquisition is completed rather late in the language development.…”

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confidence: 99%

Pedagogical grammar as the frameworkof tefl research.part 7. native language syntax acquisition: conceptual complexity

2019

Teaching Languages at Higher Institutions

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The paper presents the results of the experimental data analysis in the said sphere. Basing upon a high degree of the data similarity, the author makes a conclusion that the native language (English) syntax acquisition is a rule-governed process with its specific stages. Taking into account the said data, the author also offers some assumptions concerning the content of stages in the process of tag questions, negation, passive constructions and relative clauses acquisition in English as a native language, as well as regarding the conditions of fully inverted tag questions emergence in the child’s speech and the potential catalysts of this process. The paper analyses the influence of the minimal proximity principle on the correct interpretation of relative clauses and those containing passive constructions by the young children of different age groups. The author offers an assumption concerning the gradual character of the acquisition of conceptually complicated syntactic categories, in particular, about the dissimilar transfer speed of the passive construction use rule to the verbs indicating actions, on the one hand, and states – on the other. The paper lists the factors affecting the sequence and speed of the syntactic means acquisition, which include the semantic and grammatical complexity, frequency of use and perceptual salience. The author generalizes the stages of syntax acquisition, which include the acquirement of the sentence structure elements linear sequence (where the notions of ‘precedence’ and ‘succession’ are acquired); the acquisition of the rules, which do not take into account the sentence structure; the primary consolidation of sentence elements in terms of their surface features; the identification of sentence components on the basis of the minimum proximity principle; the formulation of the rule, which takes into account the sentence structure and its expansion to a small class of words; the gradual expansion of the latter rule to the entire class of words. The paper outlines the prospects of further research concerning the development of pedagogical grammar, taking into account the abovementioned conclusions.

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

Cited by 20 publications

References 34 publications

The Trouble With Quantifiers: Exploring Children's Deficits in Scalar Implicature

The Trouble With Quantifiers: Exploring Children's Deficits in Scalar Implicature

Testing theories of temporal inferences: Evidence from child language

Pedagogical grammar as the frameworkof tefl research.part 7. native language syntax acquisition: conceptual complexity

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