Development of Quantitative and Temporal Scalar Implicatures in a Felicity Judgment Task.

Walter Schaeken,Bojoura Schouten,Kristien Dieussaert

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02763

Walter Schaeken, Bojoura Schouten + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02763

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Abstract

Experimental investigations into children’s interpretation of scalar terms show that children have difficulties with scalar implicatures in tasks. In contrast with adults, they are for instance not able to derive the pragmatic interpretation that “some” means “not all” (Noveck, 2001; Papafragou and Musolino, 2003). However, there is also substantial experimental evidence that children are not incapable of drawing scalar inferences and that they are aware of the pragmatic potential of scalar expressions. In these kinds of studies, the prime interest is to discover what conditions facilitate implicature production for children. One of the factors that seem to be difficult for children is the generation of the scalar alternative. In a Felicity Judgment Task (FJT) the alternative is given. Participants are presented with a pair of utterances and asked to choose the most felicitous description. In such a task, even 5-year-old children are reported to show a very good performance. Our study wants to build on this tradition, by using a FJT where not only “some-all” choices are given, but also “some-many” and “many-all.” In combination with a manipulation of the number of successes/failures in the stories, this enabled us to construct control, critical and ambiguous items. We compared the performance of 59 5-year-old children with that of 34 11-year-old children. The results indicated that performance of both age groups was clearly above chance, replicating previous findings. However, for the 5-year-old children, the critical and ambiguous items were more difficult than the control items and they also performed worse on these two types of items than the 11-year-old children. Interestingly with respect to the issue of scalar diversity, the 11-year-old children were also presented temporal items, which turned out to be more difficult than the quantitative ones.

Highlights

Consider a brainstorm session for some new research lines, where the head of the research group offers the following feedback: “Some of John’s ideas were interesting.” The use of “some” seems to lead to the inference that the speaker did not find all of John’s ideas interesting
The critical items were more difficult than the control items
Compared to the control items, performance was lower for the ambiguous items, which can only be solved by a more sophisticated comparison process: neither of the alternatives is perfect, so a fine-grained comparison is needed

Summary

Introduction

Consider a brainstorm session for some new research lines, where the head of the research group offers the following feedback: “Some of John’s ideas were interesting.” The use of “some” seems to lead to the inference that the speaker did not find all of John’s ideas interesting. Consider a brainstorm session for some new research lines, where the head of the research group offers the following feedback: “Some of John’s ideas were interesting.”. The use of “some” seems to lead to the inference that the speaker did not find all of John’s ideas interesting. Different theories try to explain this kind of inferences. “Some” seems to invoke “all,” which is the more informative. “some” is strengthened by the negation of “all.” The latter step can be made on the basis of pragmatic reasoning or can be based on grammar. Quantitative and Temporal Scalar Implicatures in a FJT

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Conclusion