Scalar and ad-hoc pragmatic inferences in children: guess which one is easier

Foppolo, Francesca; Mazzaggio, Greta; Panzeri, Francesca; Surian, Luca

doi:10.1017/s030500092000032x

Cited by 23 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…The studies to-date suggest that young children often fail at restricting the meaning of scalar quantifiers through pragmatic strengthening, but succeed at doing so with numerals (Huang et al, 2013;Panizza et al, 2013), ad hoc implicatures (Stiller et al, 2015;Foppolo et al, 2020) whilst also mastering their understanding and use of the principle of contrast, another kind of pragmatic inferencing, to acquire new words. Furthermore, given that 3-year-old children are competent in other tasks requiring sophisticated pragmatic skills like theory of Mind (Onishi and Baillargeon, 2005), counterfactual thinking (Harris et al, 1996) it would only be reasonable to expect that they ought to be able to generate scalar implicatures with similar ease.…”

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Theory of Mind in development, Csibra and Gergely, 2009;Rhodes and Brandone, 2014), (b) restrict the meaning of unknown words given their knowledge of other familiar words (cf. Principle of Contrast Clark, 1990;Halberda, 2003) and (c) adopt pragmatic strengthening in other dimensions such as numerals (Panizza et al, 2013) and ad hoc scales (Stiller et al, 2015;Foppolo et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Early ERP Evidence for Children’s and Adult’s Sensitivity to Scalar Implicatures Triggered by Existential Quantifiers (Some)

Panizza¹,

Onea²,

Mani³

2021

Front. Psychol.

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How quickly do children and adults interpret scalar lexical items in speech processing? The current study examined interpretation of the scalar terms some vs. all in contexts where either the stronger (some = not all) or the weaker interpretation was permissible (some allows all). Children and adults showed increased negative deflections in brain activity following the word some in some-infelicitous versus some-felicitous contexts. This effect was found as early as 100 ms across central electrode sites (in children), and 300–500 ms across left frontal, fronto-central, and centro-parietal electrode sites (in children and adults). These results strongly suggest that young children (aged between 3 and 4 years) as well as adults quickly have access to the contextually appropriate interpretation of scalar terms.

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Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early ERP Evidence for Children’s and Adult’s Sensitivity to Scalar Implicatures Triggered by Existential Quantifiers (Some)

Panizza¹,

Onea²,

Mani³

2021

Front. Psychol.

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“…Even stronger evidence for the existence of an association between ToM and SIs in language acquisition comes from the recent study of Foppolo et al (2020). Importantly, this study was the first to systematically assess in monolingual TD children the possible correlations between SI generation, on one hand, and linguistic and cognitive abilities (lexical and morphosyntactic comprehension, IQ, and first-order ToM), on the other.…”

Section: Scalar Implicature Generation and Tommentioning

confidence: 95%

Complex Inferential Processes Are Needed for Implicature Comprehension, but Not for Implicature Production

et al. 2021

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Upon hearing “Some of Michelangelo’s sculptures are in Rome,” adults can easily generate a scalar implicature and infer that the intended meaning of the utterance corresponds to “Some but not all Michelangelo’s sculptures are in Rome.” Comprehension experiments show that preschoolers struggle with this kind of inference until at least 5 years of age. Surprisingly, the few studies having investigated children’s production of scalar expressions like some and all suggest that production is adult-like already in their third year of life. Thus, children’s production of implicatures seems to develop at least 2 years before their comprehension of implicatures. In this paper, we present a novel account of scalar implicature generation in the framework of Bidirectional Optimality Theory: the Asymmetry Account. We show that the production–comprehension asymmetry is predicted to emerge because the comprehension of some requires the hearer to consider the speaker’s perspective, but the production of some does not require the speaker to consider the hearer’s perspective. Hence, children’s comprehension of scalar expressions, but not their production of scalar expressions, is predicted to be related to their theory of mind development. Not possessing fully developed theory of mind abilities yet, children thus have difficulty in comprehending scalar expressions such as some in an adult-like way. Our account also explains why variable performance is found in experimental studies testing children’s ability to generate scalar implicatures; moreover, it describes the differences between children’s and adults’ implicature generation in terms of their ability to recursively apply theory of mind; finally, it sheds new light on the question why the interpretation of numerals does not require implicature generation.

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“…The lexical alternatives account has found support from studies showing that while children are impaired on scalar implicatures, they derive ad hoc implicatures based on the same materials with ease (Horowitz, Schneider, & Frank, 2018;Foppolo, Mazzaggio, Panzeri & Surian, 2021;Gotzner, Barner, & Crain, 2020). For example, Horowitz et al showed children three book covers with pictures of animals on each.…”

Section: Priming Enrichment In Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Priming enrichment in children

Rees¹,

Carter²,

Lewis³

2021

Preprint

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Sentences can be enriched by considering what the speaker does not say but could have done. Children, however, struggle to derive one type of such enrichments, scalar implicatures. A popular explanation for this is that they do not know the appropriate alternatives to use to generate the implicature. Namely, children are unaware of the scalar relationship between some and all. We conducted a priming study with N = 72 children, aged 5;1 years, and an adult sample, N = 50, to test this hypothesis. Participants were exposed to prime trials of strong, alternative or weak sentences involving quantifier sentences or ad hoc expressions, and then saw an ambiguous target trial that they could choose to enrich. Consistent with previous studies, children were reluctant to derive implicatures. However, there were two novel findings. (1) Children responded with twice the rate of ad hoc implicature responses than adults, suggesting that the implicature was the developmentally prior interpretation for ad hoc expressions. (2) Children showed robust priming effects, suggesting that children are aware of the scalar relationship between some and all, even if they choose not to derive the implicature.

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Scalar and ad-hoc pragmatic inferences in children: guess which one is easier

Cited by 23 publications

References 30 publications

Early ERP Evidence for Children’s and Adult’s Sensitivity to Scalar Implicatures Triggered by Existential Quantifiers (Some)

Early ERP Evidence for Children’s and Adult’s Sensitivity to Scalar Implicatures Triggered by Existential Quantifiers (Some)

Complex Inferential Processes Are Needed for Implicature Comprehension, but Not for Implicature Production

Priming enrichment in children

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