scholarly journals Plurality inferences are scalar implicatures: Evidence from acquisition

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyn Tieu ◽  
Cory Bill ◽  
Jacopo Romoli ◽  
Stephen Crain
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Title Page ◽  
Scalar Implicature ◽  
Scalar Implicatures ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
Downward Entailing ◽  
Truth Value

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>This paper provides novel experimental evidence for a scalar implicature approach to the plurality inferences that are associated with English plural morphology (</span><span>Emily fed giraffes </span><span>-&gt; </span><span>Emily fed more than one giraffe</span><span>). Using a Truth Value Judgment Task, we show that both adults and 4–5-year-old children compute more plurality inferences in upward-entailing than downward-entailing environments, but children compute fewer plurality inferences overall than adults do. These findings are consistent with previous research demonstrating children’s relative insensitivity to scalar implicatures. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of plurality inferences, and for the acquisition of scalar inferences more generally. </span></p></div></div></div>

scholarly journals A within-subjects comparison of the acquisition of quantity-related inferences

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 558
Author(s):  
Alicia Parrish ◽  
Ailís Cournane
Keyword(s):  
Judgment Task ◽  
Individual Response ◽  
Scalar Implicature ◽  
Response Patterns ◽  
Rating Task ◽  
Scalar Implicatures ◽  
Individual Subject ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
Within Subjects ◽  
The Individual

This study directly compares quantity inferences from scalar implicatures (‘Some of the ducks are black’) and uniqueness presuppositions in definites (‘the duck is black’) to exhaustivity inferences in English it-clefts (‘It’s the duck that’s black’) for which the theoretical literature disagrees on the source of inference – pragmatic (like scalar implicatures), or semantic (like presuppositions). We investigate whether within-subjects correlations in acquisition can inform us about the source of exhaustivity inferences. Assuming comprehension is achieved once the necessary basis for meaning is acquired, it-clefts should pattern with presupposition judgments if computing a presupposition is involved and should pattern with scalar implicature judgments if computing an implicature is involved. We conduct three experiments to test how closely it-cleft judgments pattern with other quantityrelated inferences, keeping materials maximally similar. The first two experiments test adult participants using a Truth Value Judgment Task and then a 3-point Rating Task; we find that adults’ response patterns to under-informative uses of these constructions differ both across individuals and across inference types, with the Rating Task giving more informative results. In the third experiment, we use the 3-point Rating Task with 4-, 5-, and 6- year olds to characterize response patterns across the three inference types for each individual subject. We find that the individual response patterns children exhibit are consistent with the theory that it-cleft exhaustivity shares an underlying cognitive source with the computation of presupposition inferences, but not with scalar implicature inferences.

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 Difficulties in Comprehending Affirmative and Negative Sentences: Evidence From Chinese Children With Reading Difficulties

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shenai Hu ◽  
Maria Vender ◽  
Gaetano Fiorin ◽  
Denis Delfitto
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Reading Difficulties ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Experimental Results ◽  
Chinese Children ◽  
Behavioral Data ◽  
Poor Readers ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
General Validity ◽  
Truth Value

Recent experimental results suggest that negation is particularly challenging for children with reading difficulties. This study looks at how young poor readers, speakers of Mandarin Chinese, comprehend affirmative and negative sentences as compared with a group of age-matched typical readers. Forty-four Chinese children were tested with a truth value judgment task. The results reveal that negative sentences were harder to process than affirmative ones, irrespective of the distinction between poor and typical readers. Moreover, poor readers performed worse than typical readers in comprehending sentences, regardless of whether they were affirmative or negative sentences. We interpret the results as (a) confirming the two-step simulation hypothesis, based on the result that the difficulty in processing negation has a general validity (persisting in pragmatically felicitous contexts), and (b) disconfirming that negation, as far as behavioral data are concerned, can be used as a reliable linguistic predictor of reading difficulties.

Linguistic cues facilitate children’s understanding of belief-reporting sentences

2021 ◽  
pp. 014272372110486
Author(s):  
Xiaowen Zhang ◽  
Peng Zhou
Keyword(s):  
Gold Medal ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Linguistic Cues ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
Mental Verbs

It has been well-documented that although children around 4 years start to attribute false beliefs to others in classic false-belief tasks, they are still less able to evaluate the truth-value of propositional belief-reporting sentences, especially when belief conflicts with reality. This article investigates whether linguistic cues, verb factivity in particular, can facilitate children’s understanding of belief-reporting sentences. Two experiments were implemented, one testing children’s knowledge of verb factivity using a gold medal task, and one investigating children’s interpretation of belief-reporting sentences using a truth-value-judgment task. Both experiments took advantage of the contrast between neutral non-factive mental verbs and strong negatively biased mental verbs. What sets the two apart is that the complement clause following a strong negatively biased mental verb is definitely false, whereas the one following a neutral non-factive mental verb remains indeterminate in the absence of additional information. The findings were that, first, 4-year-old children were able to tell the difference between the two types of mental verbs in factivity, and second, children’s performance was significantly improved when a strong negatively biased mental verb than when a neutral non-factive mental verb was used as the main verb of the belief-reporting sentences. The findings suggest that the use of strong negatively biased mental verbs facilitates children’s understanding of belief-reporting sentences. Implications of the findings are discussed in relation to the underlying mechanisms connecting verb factivity and false-belief understanding.

scholarly journals The Interpretation of Disjunction in the Scope of Dou in Child Mandarin

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shasha An ◽  
Peng Zhou ◽  
Stephen Crain
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Free Choice ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Recent Theory ◽  
Negative Polarity Items ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Downward Entailing ◽  
The Right

A recent theory provides a unified cross-linguistic analysis of the interpretations that are assigned to expressions for disjunction, Negative Polarity Items, Free Choice Items, and the non-interrogative uses of wh-phrases in languages such as Mandarin Chinese. If this approach is on the right track, children should be expected to demonstrate similar patterns in the acquisition of these linguistic expressions. Previous research has found that, by age four, children have acquired the knowledge that both the existential indefinite renhe “any” and wh-words in Mandarin Chinese are interpreted as Negative Polarity Items when they are bound by downward entailing operators, but the same expressions are interpreted as Free Choice Items (with a conjunctive interpretation) when they are bound by deontic modals (Mandarin keyi) or by the Mandarin adverbial quantifier dou “all”. The present study extends this line of research to the Mandarin disjunction word huozhe. A Truth Value Judgment Task was used to investigate the possibility that disjunction phrases that are bound by the adverbial quantifier dou generate a conjunctive interpretation in the grammars of Mandarin-speaking 4-year-old children. The findings confirmed this prediction. We discuss the implications of the findings for linguistic theory and for language learnability.

scholarly journals When “one” can be “two”: Cross-linguistic differences affect children’s interpretation of the numeral one

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-313
Author(s):  
Sarah Dolscheid ◽  
Franziska Schleussinger ◽  
Martina Penke
Keyword(s):  
Judgment Task ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
Linguistic Differences ◽  
Linguistic Difference ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

In English, a lexical distinction is drawn between the indefinite determiner “a” and the numeral “one”. English-speaking children also interpret the two terms differently, with an exact, upper bounded interpretation of the numeral “one”, but no upper bounded interpretation of the indefinite determiner “a”. Unlike English, however, German does not draw a distinction between the indefinite determiner and the numeral one but instead uses the same term “ein/e” to express both functions. To find out whether this cross-linguistic difference affects children’s upper bounded interpretation of “ein/e”, we tested German-speaking children and adults in a truth-value-judgment task and compared their performance to English-speaking children. Our results revealed that German-speaking children differed from both English children and German adults. Whereas the majority of German adults interpreted “ein/e” in an upper bounded way (i.e. as exactly one, not two), the majority of German-speaking children favored a non-upper bounded interpretation (thus accepting two as a valid response to “ein/e”). German-speaking children’s proportion of upper bounded responses to “ein/e” was also significantly lower than English children’s upper bounded responses to “one”. However, German children’s rate of upper bounded responses increased once a number-biasing context was provided. These findings suggest that German-speaking children can interpret “ein/e” in an upper bounded way but that they need additional cues in order to do so. When no such cues are present, German-speaking children differ from both German-speaking adults and from their English-speaking peers, demonstrating that cross-linguistic differences can affect the way speakers interpret numbers.

scholarly journals Another argument for embedded scalar implicatures based on oddness in downward entailing contexts

2015 ◽  
pp. 564
Author(s):  
Giorgio Magri
Keyword(s):  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Scalar Implicature ◽  
Scalar Implicatures ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Downward Entailing ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right

In Magri (2009), I argue that a sentence such as 'Some Italians come from a warm country' sounds odd because it triggers the scalar implicature that not all Italians come from a warm country, which mismatches with the common knowledge that all Italians come from the same country. If this proposal is on the right track, then oddness can be used as a diagnostic for scalar implicatures. In this paper, I use this diagnostic to provide one more argument that scalar implicatures are computed not only at the matrix level but also in embedded position. The argument is based on a puzzling pattern of oddness in downward entailing contexts.

scholarly journals Rapid Access to Scalar Implicatures in Adjacency Pair Contexts: Experimental Evidence in Spanish

Languages ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Loredo ◽  
Juan E. Kamienkowski ◽  
Virginia Jaichenco
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Conversational Implicature ◽  
Scalar Implicatures ◽  
Reading Task ◽  
Context Sensitive ◽  
Rapid Access ◽  
Acceptability Judgment

A conversational implicature arises when there is a gap between the syntactically and semantically encoded meaning of a sentence and the pragmatic meaning that is inferred in an actual communicative situation. Several experimental studies have approached the processing of implicatures and examined the extent to which the derivation of the pragmatic meaning is effortful, especially in the case of generalized implicatures, where the inferred meaning seems to be the most frequent one. In this study, we present two experiments that explore the processing of scalar implicatures with algunos ‘some’ in adjacency pair contexts through an acceptability judgment task and a self-paced reading task. Our results support the claim that the access to the meaning of some as only some is context sensitive. Moreover, they also indicate that adjacency pair structure contributes to making that meaning rapidly available.

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