Scalar Implicatures Versus Presuppositions: The View from Acquisition

Bill, Cory; Romoli, Jacopo; Schwarz, Florian; Crain, Stephen

doi:10.1007/s11245-014-9276-1

Cited by 36 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…If we accept this analysis of Bill et al (2016)'s results, then it is surprising that the children in our Experiment 2 accessed PRESUPPOSITIONLESS readings. The result is made even more surprising given our sentences were ostensibly more complex than those presented in Bill et al (2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 67%

“…The result is made even more surprising given our sentences were ostensibly more complex than those presented in Bill et al (2016). If the PRESUPPOSITIONLESS reading is accessed through some additional step, one might have expected to observe lower rates of the reading.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 83%

“…This seemed to suggest that the PRESUPPOSITIONLESS reading is accessed through some additional step (e.g., local accommodation). However, the results from Experiment 2 complicate this picture, especially when compared to previous results from a study by Bill, Romoli, Schwarz & Crain (2016). Bill et al (2016) also investigated whether adults and children could access PRESUPPOSITIONLESS readings, by looking at simple negative sentences like (13) to see if participants always included the (projected) presupposition (14) in the meaning.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…However, the results from Experiment 2 complicate this picture, especially when compared to previous results from a study by Bill, Romoli, Schwarz & Crain (2016). Bill et al (2016) also investigated whether adults and children could access PRESUPPOSITIONLESS readings, by looking at simple negative sentences like (13) to see if participants always included the (projected) presupposition (14) in the meaning. Bill et al (2016) found that while adults quite readily accessed a PRESUPPOSITIONLESS reading of (13), children were much less likely to do so.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Bill et al (2016) also investigated whether adults and children could access PRESUPPOSITIONLESS readings, by looking at simple negative sentences like (13) to see if participants always included the (projected) presupposition (14) in the meaning. Bill et al (2016) found that while adults quite readily accessed a PRESUPPOSITIONLESS reading of (13), children were much less likely to do so. These results were taken by the authors as evidence that children were generally either less likely or less able to carry out the additional mechanism required to access the PRESUPPOSITIONLESS reading of (13).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Presupposition projection from the scope of None: Universal, existential, or both?

Romoli¹

2016

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The nature of presupposition projection from the scope of quantificational expressions, particularly negative ones, continues to be both theoretically and empirically controversial. We experimentally investigate the interpretation of sentences like None of the bears won the race, which could in principle be associated with three projection options, giving rise to: an existential reading, on which at least one of the bears participated and none won; a universal reading, on which all of the bears participated and none won; and a presuppositionless reading on which none of the bears both participated and won. We used a covered box task to investigate English-speaking adults' and children's interpretations of such sentences. The results from the adult participants provide empirical evidence for all three readings; the results from the child participants, however, reveal no evidence for the existential reading. We discuss our results in light of competing theoretical accounts, focusing on options for reconciling the theories with the experimental data from both adults and children.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 67%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Presupposition projection from the scope of None: Universal, existential, or both?

Romoli¹

2016

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Probability Judgments of Gappy Sentences

Cremers

Križ

Chemla

2017

Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Approaches on Implicatures and Presuppositions

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On children’s variable success with scalar inferences: Insights from disjunction in the scope of a universal quantifier

et al. 2018

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Previous developmental studies have revealed variation in children's ability to compute scalar inferences. While children have been shown to struggle with standard scalar inferences (e.g., with scalar quantifiers like "some") (Chierchia, Crain, Guasti, Gualmini, & Meroni, 2001; Guasti et al., 2005; Noveck, 2001; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003), there is also a growing handful of inferences that children have been reported to derive quite readily (Barner & Bachrach, 2010; Hochstein, Bale, Fox, & Barner, 2016; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003; Singh, Wexler, Astle-Rahim, Kamawar, & Fox, 2016; Stiller, Goodman, & Frank, 2015; Tieu, Romoli, Zhou, & Crain, 2016; Tieu et al., 2017). One recent approach, which we refer to as the Alternatives-based approach, attributes the variability in children's performance to limitations in how children engage with the alternative sentences that are required to compute the relevant inferences. Specifically, if the alternative sentences can be generated by simplifying the assertion, rather than by lexically replacing one scalar term with another, children should be better able to compute the inference. In this paper, we investigated this prediction by assessing how children and adults interpret sentences that embed disjunction under a universal quantifier, such as "Every elephant caught a big butterfly or a small butterfly". For adults, such sentences typically give rise to the distributive inference that some elephant caught a big butterfly and some elephant caught a small butterfly (Crnič, Chemla, & Fox, 2015; Fox, 2007; Gazdar, 1979). Another possible interpretation, though not one typically accessed by adults, is the conjunctive inference that every elephant caught a big butterfly and a small butterfly (Singh, Wexler, Astle-Rahim, Kamawar, & Fox, 2016). Crucially, for our purposes, it has been argued that both of these inferences can be derived using alternatives that are generated by deleting parts of the asserted sentence, rather than through lexical replacement, making these sentences an ideal test case for evaluating the predictions of the Alternatives-based approach. The findings of our experimental study reveal that children are indeed able to successfully compute this class of inferences, providing support for the Alternatives-based approach as a viable explanation of children's variable success in computing scalar inferences.

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Scalar Implicatures Versus Presuppositions: The View from Acquisition

Cited by 36 publications

References 19 publications

Presupposition projection from the scope of None: Universal, existential, or both?

Presupposition projection from the scope of None: Universal, existential, or both?

Probability Judgments of Gappy Sentences

On children’s variable success with scalar inferences: Insights from disjunction in the scope of a universal quantifier

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