Some Pieces Are Missing: Implicature Production in Children

Abstract

Until at least 4 years of age, children, unlike adults, interpret some as compatible with all. The inability to draw the pragmatic inference leading to interpret some as not all, could be taken to indicate a delay in pragmatic abilities, despite evidence of other early pragmatic skills. However, little is known about how the production of these implicature develops. We conducted a corpus study on early production and perception of the scalar term some in British English. Children's utterances containing some were extracted from the dense corpora of five children aged 2;00 to 5;01 (N = 5,276), and analysed alongside a portion of their caregivers' utterances with some (N = 9,030). These were coded into structural and contextual categories allowing for judgments on the probability of a scalar implicature being intended. The findings indicate that children begin producing and interpreting implicatures in a pragmatic way during their third year of life, shortly after they first produce some. Their production of some implicatures is low but matches their parents' input in frequency. Interestingly, the mothers' production of implicatures also increases as a function of the children's age. The data suggest that as soon as they acquire some, children are fully competent in its production and mirror adult production. The contrast between the very early implicature production we find and the relatively late implicature comprehension established in the literature calls for an explanation; possibly in terms of the processing cost of implicature derivation. Additionally, some is multifaceted, and thus, implicatures are infrequent, and structurally and contextually constrained in both populations.

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

“…Moreover, as Eiteljoerge et al (2018) observed, the low rate of produced implicatures in a children's corpus should not come as a surprise. In fact, children's production was in line with mothers' usage, as the analysis of mothers' child-directed speech revealed.…”

“…However, as we will now see, further experimental evidence (Eiteljoerge et al, 2018) casts doubt on the plausibility of the lexicalist account.…”

“…Further evidence that children in production can show adult-like competence is provided by a recent study carried out by Eiteljoerge et al (2018). These authors conducted a corpus study analyzing the production of sentences containing the quantifier some.…”

“…Strikingly, even 2-year-old children were able to use some in a way that clearly triggers implicature generation: one child, Fraser, did so at 2;03 years of age; all the others did so before or around 3;00 years of age. In light of their data, Eiteljoerge et al (2018) criticized Barner et al's (2011) lexicalist account, claiming that: "If toddlers have not associated some with its lexical scale (many, most, all), this should affect their ability to produce, as well as comprehend, implicatures" (Eiteljoerge et al, 2018, p. 14).…”

“…In particular, we will start presenting some acquisition findings (see section "Different Tasks, Conflicting Results"). We will then introduce two influential accounts of children's difficulties and illustrate some recent corpus data (Eiteljoerge et al, 2018) that point to the fact that children are able to produce SIs already in their third year of life (see section "Previous Accounts of Children's Difficulties"). We will see that this finding casts doubts on the idea that children's difficulties lie in the process of SI generation itself (see section "The Pragmatic Tolerance Account").…”