The role of salience in young children's processing of ad-hoc implicatures

Abstract

Language comprehension often requires making implicatures. For example, inferring that "I ate some of the cookies" implicates the speaker ate some but not all (scalar implicatures); and "I ate the chocolate-chip cookies" where there are both chocolate chip cookies and raisin cookies in the context implicates that the speaker ate the chocolate chip, but not both the chocolate chip and raisin cookies (ad-hoc implicatures). Children’s ability to make scalar implicatures develops around age five, with ad-hoc implicatures emerging somewhat earlier. In the current work, using a time-sensitive tablet paradigm, we examined developmental gains in children’s ad-hoc implicature processing, and found evidence for successful pragmatic inferences by children as young as 3 years in a supportive context and substantial developmental gains in inference computation from 2 to 5 years. We also tested whether one cause of younger children (2-year-olds)'s consistent failure to make pragmatic inferences is their difficulty in inhibiting an alternative interpretation that is more salient than the target meaning (the salience hypothesis). Our findings supported this hypothesis: Younger children’s failures with pragmatic inferences were related to effects of the salience mismatch between possible interpretations.

Children understand communication intuitively but indirect communication makes them think twice – Evidence from pupillometry and looking patterns

“…Reaction time differences that were previously only evidenced in adults (Hamblin & Gibbs, 2003), were found for children in our study. In line with previous developmental studies on other pragmatic tasks (such as scalar implicature comprehension or reference resolution, see: Graham et al, 2014;Huang & Snedeker, 2009;Khu et al, 2019;Nadig & Sedivy, 2002;Nilsen et al, 2008;Yoon et al, 2015), we also found elaborate fixation patterns for those utterances that required more inferencing, that is, for indirect communicative acts. Moreover, we replicated developmental effects concerning children's object-choice performance that is in line with the children's general development of pragmatic phenomena (e.g., ad hoc quantity inferences, scalar inferences, see Wilson & Katsos, 2020;Wilson, 2020).…”

“…Finally, given that studies on children's looking behavior in other pragmatic tasks (such as scalar implicature comprehension or reference resolution) found elaborate fixation patterns for utterances that required inferencing (Graham et al, 2014;Huang & Snedeker, 2009;Khu et al, 2019;Nadig & Sedivy, 2002;Nilsen et al, 2008;Yoon et al, 2015), we expected to find more elaborate fixation patterns for indirect compared to direct communicative acts.…”

Predicting pragmatic cue integration in adults’ and children’s inferences about novel word meanings

“…By age two, children are sensitive to the informativeness of communication (O'Neill & Topolovec, 2001). By age three children can use this expectation to make pragmatic inferences (Stiller, Goodman, & Frank, 2015;Yoon & Frank, 2019) and to infer novel word meanings (Frank & Goodman, 2014). And although older children continue to struggle with some complex pragmatic inferences until age five and beyond (Noveck, 2001), an emerging consensus identifies these difficulties as stemming from difficulties reasoning about linguistic alternatives rather than pragmatic deficits (Barner, Brooks, & Bale, 2011;Horowitz, Schneider, & Frank, 2018;Skordos & Papafragou, 2016).…”

Differentiating scalar implicature from exclusion inferences in language acquisition

“…Many past studies have found that, while children readily apply exclusion inferences like contrast and mutual exclusivity during word learning, they take many years to exhibit adult-like behavior when computing scalar implicatures (e.g., that an utterance containing some implies 'not all'). However, a number of recent studies have reported surprisingly early successes at scalar implicature, usually using forced choice paradigms or direct contrast of scalar alternatives (Miller et al, 2005;Papafragou & Tantalou, 2004;Skordos & Papafragou, 2016;Stiller et al, 2015;Yoon et al, 2015). Based on these findings, we explored the possibility that some children's earliest successes on purported tests of scalar implicature could instead be explained by appeal to exclusion inference (e.g., inference driven by contrast or mutual exclusivity).…”

“…Finally, although exclusion inferences may involve asymmetric entailment (e.g., cat vs. animal), this is not a requirement, unlike in the case of scalar implicature. Papafragou & Musolino, 2003), and others finding evidence of scalar implicature in school-aged children (Chierchia, Crain, Guasti, Gualmini, & Meroni, 2001;Guasti et al, 2005;Katsos & Bishop, 2011) and in preschoolers as young as three years of age (Miller, Schmitt, Chang, & Munn, 2005;Papafragou & Tantalou, 2004;Stiller, Goodman, & Frank, 2015;Syrett & Arunachalam, 2016;Yoon, Wu, & Frank, 2015).…”