When pragmatics matters more for truth-value judgments: An investigation of quantifier scope ambiguity

Abstract

Investigations of linguistic meaning rely crucially on truth-value judgments, which assess whether a sentence can truthfully describe a given scenario. In investigations of language acquisition, truth-value judgments are used to assess both the target knowledge adults have and the developing knowledge children have at different ages. On the basis of truth-value judgments, researchers have concluded that differences between how children resolve ambiguous utterances and how adults do so persist until at least age five. Current explanations compatible with the experimental data attribute these differences to both grammatical processing and pragmatic factors. Here, we use computational cognitive modeling to formally articulate the ambiguity-resolution process that underlies child and adult judgments in a truth-value judgment task; crucially, the model can separate out the individual contributions of specific grammatical processing and pragmatic factors to the resulting judgment behavior. We find that pragmatic factors play a larger role than grammatical processing factors in explaining children’s non-adult-like ambiguity resolution behavior, and the computational modeling framework allows us to understand exactly why that is. Interestingly, the model predicts qualitative similarity between child and adult ambiguity resolution. Given this prediction, we then extend our model to show how the same processes are active in adult ambiguity resolution. This result supports continuity in the development of ambiguity resolution, where children do not qualitatively change how they resolve ambiguity in order to become adult-like. We discuss the implications of our results for acquisition more generally, including both theories of development and methods for assessing that development.

The Rational Speech Act Framework

“…Moreover, phenomena that have been argued to be semantic in nature also display interpretational and production variability and have received successful RSA treatments, including the interpretation of gradable adjectives (Lassiter & Goodman 2013, 2017Qing & Franke 2014), generics (Tessler & Goodman 2019), quantifier scope ambiguity resolution (Attali et al 2021a,b;Scontras & Pearl 2021;Song et al 2021), and presupposition projection (Qing et al 2016, Stevens et al 2017.…”

“…Arguably the most influential probabilistic approach to pragmatics is the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework (Frank & Goodman 2012, Goodman & Frank 2016. RSA and its close relatives have furthered our understanding of an ever-increasing number of wide-ranging phenomena, including reference (Degen et al 2020, Frank & Goodman 2012, Hawkins et al 2021, Heller et al 2016, Qing & Franke 2015, implicature (Bergen et al 2016, Goodman & Stuhlmüller 2013, Rohde et al 2012, vagueness (Herbstritt & Franke 2019;Lassiter & Goodman 2013, 2017Qing & Franke 2014;Schöller & Franke 2015;Tessler & Goodman 2019), figurative meaning (Kao & Goodman 2015;Kao et al 2014a,b), social meaning (Achimova et al 2022;Burnett 2017Burnett , 2019Henderson & McCready 2020;Yoon et al 2020), adaptation and convention formation (Hawkins et al 2020, Schuster & Degen 2020, pragmatic acquisition (Bohn et al 2021, Scontras & Pearl 2021, Stiller et al 2015, and quantifier scope disambiguation (Attali et al 2021a,b).…”

Social identity, precision and charity: when less precise speakers are held to stricter standard

“…In recent years, a growing body of work called for a critical re-assessment of the nature and significance of these judgments, highlighting how they are often affected by factors -and thus sources of variability -that go beyond the sheer linguistic properties of a given utterance. These include, among others, the discourse context (Sikos et al 2019;Scontras & Pearl 2021); the probability with which respondents see themselves as producing the utterance (Waldon & Degen 2020); or properties inherent to the demographic background of the speaker, such as their linguistic nativeness (Fairchild & Papafragou 2018;Fairchild, Mathis & Papafragou 2020). Our results open a novel perspective on the context-sensitivity of this behavioral measure, suggesting two takeaways.…”

“…Besides representing a task that interlocutors need to routinely navigate in everyday communicative situations, this type of assessment also plays a central methodological role in experimental semantics and pragmatics, as it stands at the core of the standard Truth Value Judgement (TVJ) task (henceforth, TVJ; Crain & McKee 1985;Crain 1998) -a paradigm which has been extensively used for studying comprehenders' interpretation processes (Noveck 2001;Papafragou & Musolino 2003;Bott & Noveck 2004 i.a.). In particular, even though recent work has begun to explore how respondents reason about the discourse situation and their relation to it to make these assessments (Sikos, Kim & Grodner 2019;Waldon & Degen 2020;Scontras & Pearl 2021), the role of social information in determining the outcome of these assessments remains largely uncharted, opening up an intriguing question that could have important theoretical and methodological ramifications for the study of pragmatic reasoning.…”

A new way to identify if variation in children’s input could be developmentally meaningful: Using computational cognitive modeling to assess input across socio-economic status for syntactic islands

“…One way to make this causal link between children's input and their developing knowledge, often measured via some observable behavior, is to use computational cognitive modeling (e.g., Dickson, Pearl, & Futrell, 2022;Pearl, 2021;Pearl & Sprouse, 2013, 2015, 2019, 2021Scontras & Pearl, 2021). A computational cognitive model aimed at explaining some component of language development can concretely implement a specific learning theory that describes how the input is used by children to update their hypotheses about language over time; children's language knowledge is then reflected in their observable language behavior.…”