Priming enrichment in children

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Rees ◽  
Ellie Carter ◽  
Lewis Bott
Keyword(s):  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Scalar Implicatures ◽  
Target Trial ◽  
Priming Effects ◽  
Adult Sample

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.

Scalar implicatures in a signed language

2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Davidson
Keyword(s):  
American Sign Language ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Spatial Information ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Spatial Location ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Visual Modality ◽  
Scalar Implicatures ◽  
Native Speakers Of English ◽  
Native Signers

This paper tests the calculation of scalar implicatures in American Sign Language (ASL) in one of the first experimental pragmatic studies in the manual/visual modality. Both native signers of ASL and native speakers of English participated in an automated Felicity Judgment Task to compare implicatures based on two traditional scales as well as “ad hoc” scales in their respective languages. Results show that native signers of ASL calculate scalar implicatures based on a prototypical scale <all, some> in ASL in the same pattern as native speakers of English, within the same experimental paradigm. There are similarly high rates of exact interpretations of numbers <three, two> in ASL as in English, despite the iconicity of the numerals in ASL. Finally, an ad hoc scale was tested showing fewer implicatures in English than on the conventionalized scales. In ASL, there was a trend toward increased implicatures on the ad hoc scale which made use of the unique ability of ASL to convey spatial information using the classifier system. Taken together, these results show that conventionalized scales in ASL have the same semantic/pragmatic scalar properties as in spoken languages, although in non-conventionalized scales the inclusion of additional information such as spatial location may affect pragmatic interpretation.

scholarly journals The trouble with quantifiers: Exploring children’s deficits in scalar implicature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Frank
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Semantic Knowledge ◽  
Scalar Implicature ◽  
Scalar Implicatures ◽  
Processing Demands ◽  
Control Study

Adults routinely use the context of utterances to infer a meaning beyond the literal semantics of their words (e.g., inferring from “She ate some of the cookies” that she ate some, but not all). Contrasting children’s (N = 209) comprehension of scalar implicatures using quantifiers with contextually-derived ad-hoc implicatures revealed that four– to five–year-olds reliably computed ad-hoc, but not scalar, implicatures (Experiment 1). Unexpectedly, performance with “some” and “none” was correlated (Experiments 1 and 2). An individual differences study revealed a correlation between quantifier knowledge and implicature success (Experiment 3); a control study ruled out other factors (Experiment 4). These findings suggest some failures with scalar implicatures may be rooted in a lack of semantic knowledge rather than general pragmatic or processing demands.

Scalar and ad-hoc pragmatic inferences in children: guess which one is easier

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Francesca FOPPOLO ◽  
Greta MAZZAGGIO ◽  
Francesca PANZERI ◽  
Luca SURIAN
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Selection Task ◽  
Scalar Implicatures ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
Truth Value

Abstract Several studies investigated preschoolers’ ability to compute scalar and ad-hoc implicatures, but only one compared children's performance with both kinds of implicature with the same task, a picture selection task. In Experiment 1 (N = 58, age: 4;2-6;0), we first show that the truth value judgment task, traditionally employed to investigate children's pragmatic ability, prompts a rate of pragmatic responses comparable to the picture selection task. In Experiment 2 (N = 141, age: 3;8-9;2) we used the picture selection task to compare scalar and ad-hoc implicatures and linked the ability to derive these implicatures to some cognitive and linguistic measures. We found that four- and five-year-olds children performed better on ad-hoc than on scalar implicatures. Furthermore, we found that morphosyntactic competence was associated with success in both kinds of implicatures, while performance on mental state reasoning was positively associated with success on scalar but not ad-hoc implicatures.

scholarly journals Intonation and Pragmatic Enrichment: How Intonation Constrains Ad Hoc Scalar Inferences

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Tomlinson ◽  
Nicole Gotzner ◽  
Lewis Bott
Keyword(s):  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Scalar Implicatures ◽  
Cognitive Level ◽  
Mouse Tracking ◽  
Intended Meaning ◽  
Pragmatic Enrichment ◽  
Pragmatic Inference ◽  
Pitch Accents

Pragmatic inferences require listeners to use alternatives to arrive at the speaker’s intended meaning. Previous research has shown that intonation interacts with alternatives but not how it does so. We present two mouse tracking experiments that test how pitch accents affect the processing of ad hoc scalar implicatures in English. The first shows that L+H* accents facilitate implicatures relative to H* accents. The second replicates this finding and demonstrates that the facilitation is caused by early derivation of the implicature in the L+H* condition. We attribute the effect to a link between L+H* and pragmatic considerations, such as speaker knowledge effects, or the saliency of alternatives relevant to the computation of implicatures. More generally our findings illustrate how intonation interacts at a cognitive level with pragmatic inference.

Ad-hoc and scalar implicatures in children with autism spectrum disorder

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 ◽  
pp. 106089
Author(s):  
Greta Mazzaggio ◽  
Francesca Foppolo ◽  
Remo Job ◽  
Luca Surian
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Children With Autism ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Scalar Implicatures

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

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica J. Yoon ◽  
Michael C. Frank
Keyword(s):  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Alternative Interpretation ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Scalar Implicatures ◽  
Developmental Gains

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.

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