Truth Value Judgment Task Research Articles

Plurality inferences are scalar implicatures: Evidence from acquisition

<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>-> </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>

Diagnosing truth, interactive sincerity, and depictive sincerity

This paper presents two experimental findings pertaining to the semantics and pragmatics of superlative modifiers ("at least", "at most"). First, in a scenario with N objects of a given type, speakers consistently judge it true that there are ‘at least N’ and ‘at most N’ objects of that type. This supports the debated position that the ignorance conveyed by superlative modifiers is an implicature, not an entailment, and contrasts with results obtained using an inference-judgment paradigm, suggesting that truth-value judgment tasks are impervious to certain pragmatic infelicities that inference-judgment tasks are sensitive to. The second finding is not predicted by any previous theory: In a scenario with N objects, it is not consistently judged true that there are ‘at most N + 1’ objects, even though it is consistently judged true that there are ‘at least N − 1’ objects. To explain this, we propose a novel pragmatic principle requiring that the scenario depicted by a sentence must be considered possible by the speaker (the Maxim of Depictive Sincerity). Put together, the two findings show that truth-value judgment tasks are impervious to some aspects of pragmatics, but not all.

On the acquisition of maximality in free relative clauses and plural definite descriptions

Plural definite descriptions (e.g. 'the things on the plate') and free relative clauses (e.g. 'what is on the plate') have been argued to share the same semantic properties, despite their syntactic differences: both are non-quantificational expressions referring to the maximal element of a given set (e.g. the set of things on the plate). Experimental support for this semantic analysis is provided by the first investigation ever of children's interpretation of both constructions. A Truth-Value Judgment task, an Act-Out task, and a corpus study of children's linguistic input show that children are aware that the two constructions are different from quantificational nominals (e.g. 'all the things on the plate', 'some of the things on the plate') very early on (4 years old), despite the major difference in frequency in the input. Children acquire the adult interpretation of both constructions at the very same time, around 6-7 years old. We suggest that this relative delay depends on children's difficulties with the concept of the maximal element of a set or its association with specific linguistic constructions.

Korean Native Speakers’ Semantic Representation of an Extrinsic Plural Marker

This study investigates how adult native speakers of Korean interpret the sentences containing Korean extrinsic plural marker -tul. This morpheme has been known as a distributive marker, by which the element it is attached to is distributed over the agent denoted by a subject nominal. Despite its unique function and disparity in judgments by Korean adult speakers, there has little research to provide a evidence of how it operates in sentence interpretations. In a picture truth value judgement task, participants were asked to compare a target sentence with a picture that either matches or mismatches it, the results showed that adult native speakers of Korean were able to licence the distributive reading when the extrinsic -tul is attached to direct objects or verbs. In addition, the copied -tul attached to a verb was found to be able to restrict its scope only to the verb rather than the verb phrase as a whole. It indicates that the extrinsic -tul plays a role of focus operator to which the element is distributed.

Isomorphism for All (but Not Both): Floating as a Means to Investigate Scope

This article investigates the so-called isomorphism effect (Musolino 1998; Musolino, Crain & Thornton 2000) in the comprehension of scopally ambiguous sentences containing negation and floating quantifiers. Given that floating quantifiers can appear in up to three surface positions relative to negation, I propose that they provide us with the ideal methodological tool to test for scope ambiguity resolution while holding constant various factors, including: (i) the associated noun phrase, and thereby the relevant thematic roles in the test stories; (ii) the syntactic position of the associated noun phrase, and thereby the relevant interpretive mechanism for achieving either a wide or narrow scope construal; (iii) the discourse contexts in which the test sentences are presented. Using a truth value judgment task, I show that both 4-year-olds and adults display isomorphic preferences in their interpretation of ambiguous sentences containing the floating quantifier all, no matter its surface position. In the case of both, children and adults display a preference for isomorphism only when both precedes negation. Crucially, for both quantifiers, children and adults display the same interpretive preferences, lending further support to the general view that children and adults do not differ in their grammatical representations of such scopally ambiguous sentences (Musolino & Lidz 2003, 2006; Gualmini 2004; Conroy, Lidz & Musolino 2009).

Processing of Numerical and Proportional Quantifiers

Quantifier expressions like "many" and "at least" are part of a rich repository of words in language representing magnitude information. The role of numerical processing in comprehending quantifiers was studied in a semantic truth value judgment task, asking adults to quickly verify sentences about visual displays using numerical (at least seven, at least thirteen, at most seven, at most thirteen) or proportional (many, few) quantifiers. The visual displays were composed of systematically varied proportions of yellow and blue circles. The results demonstrated that numerical estimation and numerical reference information are fundamental in encoding the meaning of quantifiers in terms of response times and acceptability judgments. However, a difference emerges in the comparison strategies when a fixed external reference numerosity (seven or thirteen) is used for numerical quantifiers, whereas an internal numerical criterion is invoked for proportional quantifiers. Moreover, for both quantifier types, quantifier semantics and its polarity (positive vs. negative) biased the response direction (accept/reject). Overall, our results indicate that quantifier comprehension involves core numerical and lexical semantic properties, demonstrating integrated processing of language and numbers.

'Some' Effects of Age, Task, Task Content and Working Memory on Scalar Implicature Processing.

In three experiments, we investigated the effect of age, task, task content and working memory (WM) on scalar implicature processing. We found that three-year-olds still often interpret the scalar term ‘some’ logically (some being compatible with all), but five-year-olds and especially seven-year-olds are highly competent pragmatic reasoners. Additionally we found that not only the nature of the task but also the specific task content influences the number of pragmatic answers: an Action-Based-Task (ABT) leads to more pragmatic answers than a metalinguistic Truth-Value Judgment Task (TVJT) that, in turn, leads to more pragmatic answers than a different TVJT that includes more cognitive content. Finally, we found no effect of WM in both five-year-olds and seven-year-olds. Children with a high WM capacity did not provide significantly more pragmatic answers than children with a low WM capacity.

Acquisition of the Mapping between the Causation Type and the Causative Form in Korean

This paper investigates whether the two kinds of causatives in Korean (morphological and syntactic) encode causation to different degrees of directness, and at what age children acquire these properties. A Truth-Value Judgment Task was used to test twenty Korean-speaking adults and thirty-seven Korean-speaking children. The results showed that both adults and children usually accepted the syntactic causative with both direct and indirect causation. As for the morphological causative, however, both adults and children accepted it most of the time with direct causation. Further analysis by verb type showed that childrens adult-like behavior was limited to only occur with certain high frequency verbs like mek-ta eat and ip-ta wear, suggesting that there are developmental stages children go through in acquiring the adult-like mapping between the causative form and the causative type.

Experimental Entailments: The Case of Spatial Prepositions

In this paper we present an experimental study on native speakers’ access to lexical relations among spatial relations. Our main focus is a still poorly understood domain: the lexical relations that hold between (pairs of) directional spatial prepositions (from, to) and locative prepositions (at). Two broad families of proposals exist in the literature. One family suggests that the members of these two classes of prepositions are connected via the entailment relation. Another family suggests that the overlap relation connects directional and locative prepositions. These two proposals differ with respect to the predictions they make on how speakers can accept and logically connect sentences that include such pairs of prepositions. We offer an experimental study, based on a variant of the Truth-Value Judgment Task, which aims to adjudicate which family of proposals makes the correct predictions. Then, we discuss the theoretical import of the results.

Interpretation of Verb Phrase Telicity: Sensitivity to Verb Type and Determiner Type

The authors examine how adults use linguistic information from verbs, direct objects, and particles to interpret an event description as encoding a logical endpoint to the event described (in which case, it is telic) or not (in which case, it is atelic). Current models of aspectual composition predict that quantity-sensitive verbs combined with quantized objects produce telic predicates. Behavioral results from previous experiments have not unequivocally confirmed this prediction. The study presents a more fine-grained analysis that examines the influence of partitive verbs, resultative particles, and different determiner types on listeners' evaluations of verb phrases as telic or atelic. Forty-eight English-speaking adults participated in a truth-value judgment task to determine whether they interpreted verb phrases with different types of verbs and direct objects as telic or atelic. Participants viewed short videos and responded to a yes/no question after each one. The presence of partitive quantity-sensitive verbs and the presence of a definite determiner versus a cardinal number in quantized direct objects had a differential impact on listeners' interpretations of sentences as telic. The results indicate that actual behavioral interpretations of telicity are meaningfully influenced by the presence of partitive verbs, resultative particles, and different types of determiners.

Judgment and Interpretation Tasks in Second Language Research

This article provides an overview of recent studies in second language acquisition that use tasks that elicit learners' judgments about the grammaticality of language or learners' interpretation of language. We discuss acceptability judgment tasks, preference tasks, truth-value judgment tasks, and other types of interpretation tasks. For each task type, recent studies that use that task are briefly summarized, with a focus on advantages and disadvantages of the methodology in relation to the study's objectives. A variety of topics related to task administration are covered, including (but not limited to) different types of rating scales; presentation of target sentences in isolation versus in the context of other sentences, stories, and/or pictures; visual versus auditory modality of presentation; and timed versus untimed tasks.

Long and short passives in Catalan and Spanish

Background: Poor comprehension of verbal passives in agrammatism is well attested; however, short passives have been seldom investigated, only for some Germanic languages.Aims: Here we investigate long and short passives in two Romance languages, Catalan and Spanish and, consider the implications of our results for our understanding of comprehension deficits in Broca’s aphasia and for the theoretical construal of passive sentences. We test the hypothesis that long and short passives are equally misunderstood because their underlying structures are more similar than their surface form may indicate.Methods: To that effect, we designed a truth-value judgement task and tested fourteen patients with Broca’s aphasia, seven speakers per language.Results: We show that long and short passives are equally miscomprehended, consistently across the two languages and speakers: patients performed at chance with both types of passives, while they performed above chance with active sentences.Conclusion: The results for Romance are in line with those previously found for English (the only formerly investigated Germanic language with the same word order as Spanish and Catalan). The indistinguishable performance with long and short passives provides an argument to be added to those in the linguistic literature for the analysis of short passives as involving a covert external argument. It also provides an argument for structural accounts over processing accounts of the comprehension deficit of Broca’s aphasia.

Modality and Children’s Scope Understanding

This study intends to shed light on the inconclusive argument pertaining to children's acquisition of logical form (LF) operation. Specifically, we examined children's interpretations of sentences with the ambiguous modal verb yinggai 'should,' like 'Xiaohua yinggai shangchuang shuijiao le', whose meanings depend on the landing sites of yinggai at LF (root interpretation: Xiaohua is obligated to go to bed now. epistemic interpretation: It is the case that Xiaohua has gone to bed.). The results of truth value judgment task from 15 children (range: 4;8-6;2, mean: 5;4) and 37 adults indicate that both groups tend to interpret the ambiguous yinggai as epistemic readings and that children's interpretation is adult-like. Thus, this study supports (Syrett and Lidz's in Lang Acquis 16:67-81, 2009) view that 5-year-olds have adult-like LF development and their difficulties in interpreting covert movements may be reduced to extra-grammatical factors.

Diagnosing truth, interactive sincerity, and depictive sincerity

This paper presents two experimental findings pertaining to the semantics and pragmatics of superlative modifiers ("at least", "at most"). First, in a scenario with N objects of a given type, speakers consistently judge it true that there are ‘at least N’ and ‘at most N’ objects of that type. This supports the debated position that the ignorance conveyed by superlative modifiers is an implicature, not an entailment, and contrasts with results obtained using an inference-judgment paradigm, suggesting that truth-value judgment tasks are impervious to certain pragmatic infelicities that inference-judgment tasks are sensitive to. The second finding is not predicted by any previous theory: In a scenario with N objects, it is not consistently judged true that there are ‘at most N + 1’ objects, even though it is consistently judged true that there are ‘at least N − 1’ objects. To explain this, we propose a novel pragmatic principle requiring that the scenario depicted by a sentence must be considered possible by the speaker (the Maxim of Depictive Sincerity). Put together, the two findings show that truth-value judgment tasks are impervious to some aspects of pragmatics, but not all.

Acquisition of the polarity sensitive itemrenhe‘any’ in Mandarin Chinese

The present study investigated Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of the polarity sensitive item renhe 'any' in Mandarin Chinese. Like its English counterpart any, renhe can be used as a negative polarity item (NPI), or as a free choice (FC) item, and both the distribution and interpretation of renhe are governed by the same syntactic and semantic constraints as English any. Using a Truth Value Judgment Task, the present study tested five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of FC renhe in sentences containing the modal word neng 'can', and tested children's comprehension of NPI renhe in sentences containing the temporal conjunction zai…zhiqian 'before'. Most children demonstrated knowledge of the interpretation of both FC renhe and NPI renhe despite a paucity of relevant adult input. Like adults, however, Mandarin-speaking children do not use renhe frequently in ordinary conversation, due to the availability of alternative colloquial expressions (wh-pronouns) that also convey children's intended meanings.

Effects of children's working memory capacity and processing speed on their sentence imitation performance

More limited working memory capacity and slower processing for language and cognitive tasks are characteristics of many children with language difficulties. Individual differences in processing speed have not consistently been found to predict language ability or severity of language impairment. There are conflicting views on whether working memory and processing speed are integrated or separable abilities. To evaluate four models for the relations of individual differences in children's processing speed and working memory capacity in sentence imitation. The models considered whether working memory and processing speed are integrated or separable, as well as the effect of the number of operations required per sentence. The role of working memory as a mediator of the effect of processing speed on sentence imitation was also evaluated. Forty-six children with varied language and reading abilities imitated sentences. Working memory was measured with the Competing Language Processing Task (CLPT), and processing speed was measured with a composite of truth-value judgment and rapid automatized naming tasks. Mixed-effects ordinal regression models evaluated the CLPT and processing speed as predictors of sentence imitation item scores. A single mediator model evaluated working memory as a mediator of the effect of processing speed on sentence imitation total scores. Working memory was a reliable predictor of sentence imitation accuracy, but processing speed predicted sentence imitation only as a component of a processing speed by number of operations interaction. Processing speed predicted working memory capacity, and there was evidence that working memory acted as a mediator of the effect of processing speed on sentence imitation accuracy. The findings support a refined view of working memory and processing speed as separable factors in children's sentence imitation performance. Processing speed does not independently explain sentence imitation accuracy for all sentence types, but contributes when the task requires more mental operations. Processing speed also has an indirect effect on sentence imitation by contributing to working memory capacity.

Generic reference in adult German bilinguals: how bilinguals deal with variation

AbstractThis study investigates subject nominals in German in adult simultaneous bilinguals (2L1s) with French or Italian as the other language, focusing on plural and mass nouns with a definite article. These have a specific interpretation in written Standard German, while they are ambiguous between a specific and a generic interpretation in the Romance languages and in some varieties of German. The aims are to (i) characterize the end‐state grammar regarding a phenomenon that does not only show partially overlapping syntactic properties in the two target languages but also intra‐linguistic variation, (ii) compare 2L1 and L1 end‐state grammars, (iii) investigate the role of frequency of exposure and (iv) study the role of overlap with the contact languages. Results from an acceptability judgment task and a truth value judgment task suggest that 2L1s with frequent exposure to German are more conservative than monolinguals, tending towards overcorrection rather than cross‐linguistic influence.

THE ROLE OF SEMANTIC TRANSFER IN CLITIC DROP AMONG SIMULTANEOUS AND SEQUENTIAL CHINESE-SPANISH BILINGUALS

This study examines the acquisition of the featural constraints on clitic and null distribution in Spanish among simultaneous and sequential Chinese-Spanish bilinguals from Peru. A truth value judgment task targeted the referential meaning of null objects in a negation context. Objects were elicited via two clitic elicitation tasks that targeted anaphoric contexts and left-dislocated topics. An acceptability task tested sensitivity to left-dislocated object drop. Although simultaneous bilinguals were mostly undistinguishable from monolinguals, the late learners differed from both of these groups across tasks. Age of arrival led to different outcomes, with late learners showing more deficits than the child learners. Late learners avoided using clitics and relied on lexical and null objects. Residual transfer effects were observed among the child learners in the form of insensitivity to the features that serve as the basis for null argument identification and clitic deficits in production. It is also argued that transfer persists despite early and intense exposure to the second language in a natural environment because of the existence of an unmarked argument identification option in the first language.

Scalar Implicatures in Child Language: Give Children a Chance

Children's pragmatic competence in deriving conversational implicatures (and scalar implicatures in particular) offers an intriguing standpoint to explore how developmental, methodological, and purely theoretical perspectives interact and feed each other. In this paper, we focus mainly on developmental and methodological issues, showing that children from age 6 on are adult-like in deriving the scalar implicature related to the scalar quantifier some (i.e. they interpret some as some but not all), while children at age 4 and 5 only sometimes reject underinformative-some in a classical Truth Value Judgment Task (Experiment 1). They do so despite their excellent performance in pragmatic tasks that evaluate their competence with the rules of talk exchange, such as the Conversational Violations Test (Experiment 4) and the Felicity Judgment Task (Experiment 5). To give children a better chance to reject underinformative-some when all is at stake, we manipulated the experimental design and materials in three different ways: 1) in Experiment 2, we tested the partitive alcuni dei (some of) instead of the bare quantifier qualche (some); 2) in Experiment 3, we attempted to prime the scale <some, all> by asking children to judge a correct statement with all before the critical underinformative statement with some; 3) in Experiment 6, we aimed at making children more aware of the ambiguity of some, between its basic meaning (at least some, possibly all) and its strengthened meaning (some but not all). A surprising improvement is recorded in the last experiment, in which the rejection of underinformative-some by 5-year-old children rose to 72.5% (it was 42% in Experiment 1). We suggest that the children's low performance with scalar inference might be linked to the interplay of different factors as in the development of other general cognitive abilities, such as the ability to change one's strategy (Shallice, 1982) or to shift one's perspective (Gopnik & Rosati, 2001), the maturation of the lexicon (Barner & Bachrach, 2010), and especially their great sensitivity to the task, methodology and materials used to test their pragmatic abilities.

The semantics and pragmatics of belief reports in preschoolers

&lt;p class="p1"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 10px;"&gt;Children under 4 years have been claimed to lack adult-like semantic representations of belief verbs like ‘think’. Based on two experiments involving a truth-value judgment task, we argue that 4-year olds’ apparently deviant interpretations arise from pragmatic difficulty understanding the &lt;/span&gt;&lt;em style="font-size: 10px;"&gt;relevance &lt;/em&gt;&lt;span style="font-size: 10px;"&gt;of belief, rather than from conceptual or semantic immaturity. &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;