Semantic and Pragmatic Competence in Children’s and Adults’ Comprehension of Or

Chierchia, Gennaro; Guasti, Maria Teresa; Gualmini, Andrea; Meroni, Luisa; Crain, Stephen; Foppolo, Francesca

doi:10.1057/9780230524125_13

Cited by 71 publications

(38 citation statements)

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“…The pragmatic computation studied in this paper includes two components needed to derive implicatures: building and maintaining alternative representations of a statement, and the comparison and evaluation of pragmatic felicity (cf. Chierchia et al 2001Chierchia et al , 2004. 37 Previous SI studies which have reported children's insensitivity to SIs have not found which component, when lacking, causes children to have difficulty computing implicatures.…”

Section: Remaining Problemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, Noveck (2001) reports that English and French children are insensitive to SIs evoked by scalar terms such as 'some' and 'might. ' Chierchia et al (2001, Experiment 2) found that 5-year-old English-speaking children accepted underinformative sentences such as (8) half of the time in a context where (9) is true, while no adult did (see also Chierchia et al 2004; cf. also Braine and Rumain 1981;Paris 1973;Smith 1980, among others).…”

Section: Previous Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The source of children's non-adult interpretation, they claim, stems from processing demands imposed when children "build and maintain in working memory different representations of an assertion" (Chierchia et al 2004: 298). This Processing Limitation Hypothesis (henceforth, PLH; Chierchia et al 2004) predicts that children should perform like adults in tasks that assess their knowledge of SIs, as long as they do not have to construct alternative representations. The PLH suggests that children's seeming lack of pragmatic knowledge and their insensitivity to SIs do not stem from any difficulty in comparing the relevant representations or computing SIs.…”

Section: Previous Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Zondervan 2009; see also Papafragou and Tantalou 2004;Verbuk 2007) and the Felicity Judgment (FJ) task based on the Processing Limitation Hypothesis (PLH) (cf. Chierchia et al 2001, Experiment 3;Chierchia et al 2004). 1 This paper investigates whether or not Japanese-speaking children are sensitive to conventional implicatures when interpreting sentences containing the focus particle datte 'even,' and if they are not, whether the two methods above can enhance children's sensitivity to the particle's conventional implicatures.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Experiment 3 tested whether or not the FJ task/ PLH , which is reported to facilitate the calculation of SIs, also facilitates calculation of conventional implicatures, i.e., whether or not a lightened processing load facilitates children's ability to judge correctly the felicity of datte sentences. The FJ task proposed by Chierchia et al (2001Chierchia et al ( , 2004 was employed: stimulus statements were presented with alternative statements for comparison.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Japanese-speaking children's interpretation of sentences containing the focus particle datte even: Conventional implicatures, QUD, and processing limitations

Ito

2012

Linguistics

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This paper investigates Japanese-speaking children's (in)sensitivity to information strength when interpreting sentences containing the focus particle datte 'even.' It examines whether or not their sensitivity is affected by the Question Under Discussion (QUD) and the Felicity Judgment (FJ) task based on the Processing Limitation Hypothesis (PLH; cf. Chierchia et al. 2001 cf. Chierchia et al. , 2004.Because datte 'even' is not a scalar term, it does not give rise to scalar implicatures (SIs) by constituting a part of scales. 'Even' evokes conventional implicatures. However, an 'even' sentence in context -in addition to the conventional implicatures -evokes a special case of SI calculated from contextdependent scales, which is pragmatic inferences induced by 'even's conventional implicatures (i.e., the word's semantic/pragmatic import). The relevant scale (generally) concerns the NP element focused by 'even' and a set of alternatives. Because sentences without 'even' do not evoke any SI, I assume that the relevant implicatures are conventional in nature.Three experiments were done to examine whether Japanese-speaking children are really (in)capable of calculating conventional implicatures derived from datte sentences. It was found that (i) Children are insensitive to pragmatic anomalies of single "infelicitous" sentences (Experiments 1 and 2 Zondervan (2007Zondervan ( , 2009, the wh-focus/QUD way of asking questions does not facilitate the children's performance with datte sentences (Experiment 2). (iii) The FJ task improved children's performance (Experiment 3), thus supporting the PLH, which was applied to SI computation cf. Reinhart 1999 cf. Reinhart , 2006, and to the computation of implicatures involved in datte sentences. (iv) Children are unable to compute implicatures based on context-specific pragmatic scales Brought to you by | Simon Fraser University Authenticated Download Date | 6/1/15 3:15 AM 106 M. Ito derived from datte sentences, when a single "underinformative" statement is given. This partly contradicts previous findings on SI based on contextdependent pragmatic scales (Papafragou and Tantalou 2004). ). This inability to detect pragmatic infelicity is consistent with findings about their ability to compute SIs. On the other hand, the adults showed sensitivity to conventional implicatures in all three experiments, which may be taken as evidence that the computation of implicatures derived from datte sentences differs from that of SIs. (ii) Unlike the results reported for SI inThe results indicate that children's insensitivity to the pragmatic infelicity of datte sentences stems from the processing load induced by building and maintaining alternative representations, as reported for SI computation.

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Section: Remaining Problemsmentioning

confidence: 99%