Pragmatic, linguistic and cognitive factors in young children's development of quantity, relevance and word learning inferences

Wilson, Elspeth; Katsos, Napoleon

doi:10.1017/s0305000921000453

Cited by 10 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 67 publications

(128 reference statements)

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“…A review by Matthews and colleagues [36] already shows that competence in pragmatic measures is often associated with formal language in child language acquisition. Indeed, recent studies find such a link both for children's implicature comprehension [69,70] and irony understanding [71][72][73]. Importantly, our study confirms that this point can also be made for metaphors specifically.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Linguistic Skills and Socioeconomic Status: Two Oft Forgotten Factors in Child Metaphor Comprehension

Pouscoulous,

Perovic

2023

Children

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Metaphor understanding can be tricky for children until mid-childhood, yet some research suggests that pre-schoolers are already competent. Many factors have been proposed to play a role in the development of metaphor comprehension. In this study we focus on two obvious contenders that have been overlooked in recent years: general language skills and socioeconomic status (SES). Two-hundred and seventy-two children, aged from 2;11 to 11;04 (146 girls) were recruited from 21 British schools and nurseries. Their SES was established using a composite measure linked to school location, while general language skills were assessed using a standardised measure of vocabulary comprehension. Novel metaphor comprehension was tested with a simple reference assignment task. Our study confirms that children interpret novel metaphors confidently from the age of 4. Our findings indicate that novel metaphor understanding is associated with age and, importantly, that it is linked to vocabulary skills, as well as SES, but not gender. These two factors should therefore be considered in future research on metaphor development, as well as intervention and education.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Linguistic Skills and Socioeconomic Status: Two Oft Forgotten Factors in Child Metaphor Comprehension

Pouscoulous,

Perovic

2023

Children

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“…A growing portion of this work is devoted to studying individual differences (Lorge, 2019;Matthews, Biney, & Abbot-Smith, 2018;O'Neill, 2007; A. Wilson & Bishop, 2022;E. Wilson & Katsos, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An individual differences perspective on pragmatic abilities in the preschool years

Bohn¹,

Tessler²,

Kordt³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Pragmatic abilities are fundamental to successful language use and learning. Individual differences studies contribute to understanding the psychological processes involved in pragmatic reasoning. Small sample sizes, insufficient measurement tools, and a lack of theoretical precision have hindered progress, however. Three studies addressed these challenges in three- to five-year-old German-speaking children (N = 228, 121 female). Studies 1 and 2 assessed the psychometric properties of six pragmatics tasks. Study 3 investigated relations among pragmatics tasks and between pragmatics and other cognitive abilities. The tasks were found to measure stable variation between individuals. Via a computational cognitive model, individual differences were traced back to a latent pragmatics construct. This presents the basis for understanding the relations between pragmatics and other cognitive abilities.

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“…This seems to be in contrast with the fact that children are very capable from younger ages when it comes to other pragmatic abilities (Condry & Spelke 2008, Matthews et al 2012, Tomasello 2003, and begs the question of whether their difficulties with quantity implicatures may be due not to general pragmatic language delay, but to some other factors. For instance, the data underline a distinction between lexical and ad-hoc scales, with the former being significantly more difficult than the latter (Foppolo et al 2020, Horowitz et al 2017, Kampa & Papafragou 2019, Stiller et al 2015, Wilson & Katsos 2021, Yoon & Frank 2019, Zhao et al 2021. In a way, this seems to suggest that the difficulty children have with implicatures lays in their lexical knowledge.…”

mentioning

confidence: 90%

The investigation of quantity implicatures during typical development: a systematic review

Porrini

Surian²

2023

ELM

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The present work is a systematic review on the acquisition of quantity implicatures in typically developing children. The references were selected through the PRISMA method. The criteria for eligibility were that the articles should be peer-reviewed, published articles written in English, containing empirical data on the comprehension of quantity implicatures in first language acquisition during typical development. The aim of this review is three-fold. First, to provide a picture of what empirical data tells us about the acquisition of quantity implicatures, based on both lexical and ad-hoc scales, potentially contributing to theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. Second, to analyze the methodologies that have been used to test children and their adequacy. And lastly to evaluate whether or not systematic review is an accurate analysis method for this type of varied and often complicated data. The results suggest that children improve in implicature derivation with age, especially with lexical scales, and that action-based tasks not based on meta-linguistic evaluations might be better suited to test these inferences, especially as opposed to Truth Value Judgment tasks. The fact that the systematic analysis confirms previously individuated trends in the acquisition of implicatures confirms that this is in fact a useful methodology to analyze the data, even with its limitations.

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Pragmatic, linguistic and cognitive factors in young children's development of quantity, relevance and word learning inferences

Cited by 10 publications

References 67 publications

Linguistic Skills and Socioeconomic Status: Two Oft Forgotten Factors in Child Metaphor Comprehension

Linguistic Skills and Socioeconomic Status: Two Oft Forgotten Factors in Child Metaphor Comprehension

An individual differences perspective on pragmatic abilities in the preschool years

The investigation of quantity implicatures during typical development: a systematic review

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