Why children and adults sometimes (but not always) compute implicatures

Abstract

Noveck (2001) argued that children even as old as 11 do not reliably endorse a scalar interpretation of weak scalar terms (some, might, or) (cf. Smith, 1980; Braine and Rumain, 1981). More recent studies suggest, however, that children's apparent failures may depend on the experimental demands (Papafragou & Musolino, 2003). Although previous studies involved children of different ages as well as different tasks, and are thus not directly comparable, nevertheless a common finding is that children do not seem to derive scalar implicatures to the same extent as adults do. The present article describes a series of experiments that were conducted with Italian speaking subjects (children and adults), focusing mainly on the scalar term some. Our goal was to carefully examine the specific conditions that allow the computation of implicatures by children. In so doing, we demonstrate that children as young as seven (the youngest age of the children who participated in the Noveck study) are able to compute implicatures in experimental conditions that properly satisfy certain contextual prerequisites for deriving such implicatures. We also present further results that have general consequences for the research methodology employed in this area of study. Our research indicates that certain tasks mask children's understanding of scalar terms, not only including the task used by Noveck, but also tasks that employ certain explicit instructions, such as the training task used by Papafragou & Musolino (2003). Our findings indicate further that, although explicit training apparently improves children's ability to draw implicatures, children nevertheless fail to achieve adult levels of performance for most scalar terms even in such tasks, 2 and that the effects of instruction do not last beyond the training session itself for most children.Another relevant finding of the present study is that some of the manipulations of the experimental context have an effect on all subjects, whereas others produce effects on just a subset of children.Individual differences of this kind may have been concealed in previous research because performance by individual subjects was not reported. Our general conclusions are that even young children (7-year-old) have the prerequisites for deriving scalar implicatures, although these abilities are revealed only when the conversational background is natural.

Quantity implicature and access to scalar alternatives in language acquisition

“…By encouraging children to actively search alternativeswhich they might otherwise avoid due to the additional effort required -such training might compensate for weak knowledge of scales, allowing children to succeed during the course of the experiment. Consistent with this, training effects are transient, and do not persist after a delay of one week (Guasti et al 2005). By this account, if quantifiers were associated as members of scales (not a processing cost in itself) children would access alternatives without problem, as they do for numerals.…”

“…It is uncontroversial that context affects when and whether children (or adults, for that matter) will compute implicatures (e.g., Guasti, Chierchia, Crain, Foppolo, Gualmini & Meroni 2005;Papafragou & Musolino 2003;Musolino 2006). It is also known that working memory capacity grows over the course of development (e.g., Gathercle & Baddeley 1990).…”

Pragmatic Inferences in High-Functioning Adults with Autism and Asperger Syndrome

“…When presented with underinformative sentences like ''Some giraffes have long necks'', 89% of the children in Noveck's study answered that this statement is true (logical/literal interpretation), while only 41% of the adults responded true. Other developmental studies have confirmed the finding that children do not derive scalar implicatures to the same extent as adults do, even when given more explicit instructions, a training session or acting out tasks that do not require real world knowledge and which are easier for children (Guasti et al 2005;Papafragou and Musolino 2003;Pouscoulous et al 2007). The finding that children's performance improved when manipulating experimental conditions, suggests that it is not merely pragmatic competence as such that is lacking in children, and that limited cognitive resources may be part of the explanation.…”

Differences between Spanish monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual children in their calculation of entailment-based scalar implicatures

“…This work was also replicated and extended by Guasti et al (2005) with Italian speakers (their Experiment 1). Noveck (2001) implemented an important change to Smith's original design, transforming her questions into declaratives, which expressed a proposition that could be assigned a truth value.…”

“…(This is to say nothing of the intense focus on SIs in adult psycholinguistic studies, which we do not review here.) Researchers around the globe have investigated whether children are able to calculate such implicatures (Noveck 2001), and if so, whether their ability to do so depends on the lexical items featured in the experiment (Papafragou & Musolino 2003;Hurewitz et al 2006;Pouscoulous et al 2007), the nature of scalar implicature being targeted (Papafragou & Tantalou 2004;Barner et al 2011;Stiller et al 2015), the amount of contextual and pragmatic support for implicature calculation (Papafragou & Musolino 2003;Guasti et al 2005), the type of judgment children are permitted to provide and the type of task administered (Miller et al 2005;Katsos & Bishop 2011;Foppolo et al 2012;Syrett et al in press), whether children are given evidence for the importance of contrasting scalar alternatives within an experimental session (Vargas-Tokuda, Gutiérrez-Rexach & Grinstead 2008;Foppolo et al 2012;Skordos & Papafragou 2016;Syrett et al in press) and whether implicature calculation is delayed relative to the generation of semantic material (Huang & Snedeker 2009).…”