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

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica J. Yoon ◽  
Michael C. Frank

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.

Author(s):  
Patricia A. Carpenter ◽  
Marcel Adam Just

Author(s):  
Laura Quick

This chapter argue that ritual behaviours might be just as good a source as literary texts for the diffusion of traditional cursing and treaty material across different cultures in the ancient Near East. In particular, the role of ad hoc oral Targum in the ritual process could have been an important means by which traditions were shared between different language communities. Recognition of the ritual context of this material also provides insights for the comparative method, the dating and authorship of Deuteronomy 28, and the subversive impetus thought to have stood behind its composition. Ultimately, the function of the written word in a largely oral world is shown to be fundamental to understanding the composition, function and the early history of the curses in the book of Deuteronomy.


Author(s):  
Martin Mennecke

Universal jurisdiction permits states to investigate and prosecute perpetrators of certain widely condemned offences, irrespective of whether they possess any of the traditional territorial, nationality, or other jurisdictional links to the offence. As a legal principle, African states accept the principle of universal jurisdiction, but in the past decade they have pushed back against it due to the perception that the courts of various European states have unfairly targeted African government officials that they perceive as enemies. Against this background, the chapter examines the status of the universal jurisdiction debate and how it relates to the role of the International Criminal Court and that of the African Union and its member states, in addition to evaluating the proposals made by African states within the framework of the United Nations to address the African government concerns about double standards in the application of universal jurisdiction through a special ad hoc committee of the General Assembly.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 15-25
Author(s):  
Ben Kiregyera

Adoption of development agendas at different levels – national, regional, continental, and global level – has led to an unprecedented increase in demand for official statistics. This increase has not only brought to the fore a litany of challenges facing National Statistical Systems (NSSs) in Africa but also it has created opportunities for strengthening statistical production and development. This paper underscores the need for countries to take full advantage of these opportunities and increase investments in statistics, undertake data innovation, and expand and diversify data ecosystems, leveraging on the foundations of the data revolution for sustainable development and in line with current international statistical frameworks. The paper posits that these improvements will not happen coincidentally nor through ad hoc, piecemeal and uncoordinated approaches. Rather they will happen through more systematic, coordinated and multi-sectoral approaches to statistical development. The National Strategy for the Development of Statistics (NSDS) is presented as a comprehensive and robust framework for building statistical capacity and turning around NSSs in African countries. The paper unpacks the NSDS; elaborates the NSDS processes including; mainstreaming sectors into the NSDS, the stages of the NSDS lifecycle and the role of leadership in the NSDS proces; highlights NSDS extension; presents the design and implementation challenges, and the key lessons learned from the NSDS processes in Africa in the last 15 years or so.


2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARILYN VIHMAN ◽  
TAMAR KEREN-PORTNOY

Carol Stoel-Gammon has made a real contribution in bringing together two fields that are not generally jointly addressed. Like Stoel-Gammon, we have long focused on individual differences in phonological development (e.g. Vihman, Ferguson & Elbert, 1986; Vihman, Boysson-Bardies, Durand & Sundberg, 1994; Keren-Portnoy, Majorano & Vihman, 2008). And like her, we have been closely concerned with the relationship between lexical and phonological learning. Accordingly, we will focus our discussion on two areas covered by Stoel-Gammon (this issue) on which our current work may shed some additional light.


2021 ◽  
pp. 008467242110316
Author(s):  
Lucas A Keefer ◽  
Faith L Brown ◽  
Thomas G Rials

Past research suggests that death pushes some individuals to strongly promote religious worldviews. The current work explores the role of conceptual metaphor in this process. Past research shows that metaphors can provide meaning and certainty, suggesting that death may therefore cause people to be more attracted to epistemically beneficial metaphoric descriptions of God. In three studies, we test this possibility against competing alternatives suggesting that death concerns may cause more selective metaphor preferences. Using both correlational (Study 1 and pre-registered replication) and experimental (Study 2) methods, we find that death concern is generally associated with embracing metaphors about God.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Rees ◽  
Ellie Carter ◽  
Lewis Bott

Sentences can be enriched by considering what the speaker does not say but could have done. Children, however, struggle to derive one type of such enrichments, scalar implicatures. A popular explanation for this is that they do not know the appropriate alternatives to use to generate the implicature. Namely, children are unaware of the scalar relationship between some and all. We conducted a priming study with N = 72 children, aged 5;1 years, and an adult sample, N = 50, to test this hypothesis. Participants were exposed to prime trials of strong, alternative or weak sentences involving quantifier sentences or ad hoc expressions, and then saw an ambiguous target trial that they could choose to enrich. Consistent with previous studies, children were reluctant to derive implicatures. However, there were two novel findings. (1) Children responded with twice the rate of ad hoc implicature responses than adults, suggesting that the implicature was the developmentally prior interpretation for ad hoc expressions. (2) Children showed robust priming effects, suggesting that children are aware of the scalar relationship between some and all, even if they choose not to derive the implicature.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanisa anuyahong ◽  
Charoonsri Chusak ◽  
Sirichai Adisakwattana

Recent clinical studies support the beneficial role of riceberry rice and its food products on controlling glycemic response in healthy subjects. The aim of the current work was to determine...


2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-302
Author(s):  
Roger Masterman

It is often claimed that the constitutional role of the UK’s apex court is enriched as a result of the experiences of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as interpreter of constitutions within its overseas jurisdiction. This paper considers the relationship between the House of Lords/UK Supreme Court and the Judicial Committee and its effect on the importation of external influences into the UK’s legal system(s), further seeking to assess how far the jurisprudence of the Judicial Committee has influenced constitutional decision-making in the UK apex court. While ad hoc citation of Privy Council authorities in House of Lords/Supreme Court decisions is relatively commonplace, a post-1998 enthusiasm for reliance on Judicial Committee authority – relating to (i) a ‘generous and purposive’ approach to constitutional interpretation and (ii) supporting the developing domestic test for proportionality – quickly faded. Both areas are illustrative of a diminishing reliance on Judicial Committee authority, but reveal divergent approaches to constitutional borrowing as the UK apex court has incrementally mapped the contours of an autochthonous constitutionalism while simultaneously recognising the trans-jurisdictional qualities of the proportionality test.


Author(s):  
Rafael Martínez-Gallego ◽  
Juan Pedro Fuentes-García ◽  
Miguel Crespo

The prevention strategies used by tennis coaches when delivering tennis lessons during the COVID-19 pandemic were analyzed in this study. An ad hoc questionnaire collected data from 655 Spanish and Portuguese speaking tennis coaches working in Latin America and Europe. Differences in the prevention measures were analyzed according to the continent, the coaches’ experience, and the type of facility they worked in. Results showed that coaches used information provided from local and national organizations more than from international ones. Hand hygiene, communication of preventive strategies, and changes in the coaching methodology were the most used prevention measures. Latin American coaches and those working in public facilities implemented the measures more often than their European colleagues or those working in private venues. Finally, more experienced coaches showed a greater awareness of the adoption of the measures than their less experienced counterparts. The data provided by this research may assist in developing new specific guidelines, protocols, and interventions to help better understand the daily delivery of tennis coaching in this challenging context.


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