Abstract
AbstractTo better understand the developmental trajectory of children's pragmatic development, studies that examine more than one type of implicature as well as associated linguistic and cognitive factors are required. We investigated three- to five-year-old English-speaking children's (N = 71) performance in ad hoc quantity, scalar quantity and relevance implicatures, as well as word learning by exclusion inferences, using a sentence-to-picture-matching story-based task. Children's pragmatic abilities improved with age, with word learning by exclusion acquired first, followed by relevance and ad hoc quantity implicatures, and finally scalar quantity implicatures. In an exploratory analysis (with a subset of the data N = 58), we found that structural language knowledge was a predictor of pragmatic performance (but no evidence for an association with socioeconomic status or Theory of Mind, controlling for structural language). We discuss reasons why this developmental pattern emerges with reference to linguistic and extra-linguistic properties of these inferences.
Highlights
IntroductionChildren have to learn how to make inferences to understand the meaning which the speaker intends to convey, beyond the literal meaning of what was uttered
In developing communicative abilities, children have to learn how to make inferences to understand the meaning which the speaker intends to convey, beyond the literal meaning of what was uttered
We have argued that developing an understanding of relevance and ability to track the QUESTION UNDER DISCUSSION (QUD) for elaborative inferencing is important for both relevance and quantity implicatures
Summary
Children have to learn how to make inferences to understand the meaning which the speaker intends to convey, beyond the literal meaning of what was uttered. On Grice’s (1989) approach to pragmatics, both the speaker and hearer have expectations about CO-OPERATIVE communication, and assume that the other will be truthful, informative, relevant and conventional. In (1), a QUANTITY IMPLICATURE, the hearer can infer that the speaker took ONLY a strawberry from the fridge, because, had she taken more, she would have said so to provide a fully informative answer to the question. In (2), a RELEVANCE IMPLICATURE, in a context where the available alternatives are cereal or toast, the hearer can infer that the speaker wants cereal, because the world knowledge that milk is required for cereal makes this a relevant answer to the question. We first present our motivations for this study, both empirical and theoretical, before briefly surveying existing findings on the development of each inference type and the contribution of other factors
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