Abstract
Up to age 5, children are known to experience difficulties in the derivation of implicitly conveyed content, sticking to literally true, even if underinformative, interpretation of sentences. The computation of implicated meanings is connected to the (apparent or manifest) violation of Gricean conversational maxims. We present a study that tests unmotivated violations of the maxims of Quantity, Relevance, and Manner and of the Maximize Presupposition principle, with a Truth Value Judgment task with three options of response. We tested pre-schoolers and school-aged children, with adults as controls, to verify at which age these pragmatic rules are recognized and to see whether there is a difference among these tenets. We found an evolutionary trend and that, in all age groups, violations of the maxims of Quantity and of Relation are sanctioned to a higher degree compared to infringements of the Maim of Manner and of the Maximize Presupposition principle. We conjecture that this relates to the effects that the violation of a certain maxim or principle has on the goals of the exchange: listeners are less tolerant with statements that transmit inaccurate or incomplete information, while being more tolerant with those that still permit to understand what has happened.
Highlights
In his seminal work, Grice (1975) proposed an account of how speakers can communicate more than what they literally say based on the assumption that rational interlocutors collaborate to reach a common objective and that the most efficient way to accomplish this goal is to follow the maxims of conversation
We aimed at assessing whether children are sensitive to violations of pragmatic principles, testing unmotivated violations of the Gricean maxims of Quantity, Relation, and Manner, and of the Maximize Presupposition principle
We wanted to determine whether children’s pragmatic competence improves with age and whether there is a difference in the sanctioning of violations of different maxims and of the Maximize Presupposition principle
Summary
In his seminal work, Grice (1975) proposed an account of how speakers can communicate more than what they literally say based on the assumption that rational interlocutors collaborate to reach a common objective and that the most efficient way to accomplish this goal is to follow the maxims of conversation. These maxims regulate both the content of what is said—that has to be true (maxim of Quality), enough informative (maxim of Quantity), and relevant (maxim of Relation)—and its form: statements are required to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and with the events reported orderly (maxim of Manner). If one utters “Lawyers are sharks,” a statement that is obviously false if taken at face value, interlocutors will reinterpret it as a metaphoric comment
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