It has been proposed that children may fail to comprehend pragmatic aspects of meaning, even though they have little difficulty producing pragmatically appropriate utterances as speakers. A novel account, the pragmatic tolerance hypothesis, predicts that in certain cases children are in fact pragmatically competent both as speakers and as comprehenders and what develops with age is their metalinguistic awareness about accepting or rejecting pragmatically infelicitous utterances as comprehenders. In this paper we focus on pragmatic violations due to over-informativeness and report an investigation into English-speaking 5-year-old children's and adults' production and evaluation of referring expressions. Like adults, children do not over-inform as speakers but unlike adults, child comprehenders do not reject over-informative utterances when given a binary judgment choice. However, when given a magnitude estimation scale which allows for intermediate responses, child comprehenders do penalise over-informative utterances and rate them lower than optimal ones. The findings support the pragmatic tolerance hypothesis. By comparing over-informativeness to under-informativeness and other cases of pragmatic inferencing we propose a set of constraints that predict which pragmatic violations child comprehenders could be tolerant towards.

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Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) assessing the overall replicability of a single theoretically important phenomenon and (b) examining methodological, cultural, and developmental moderators. We focus on infants’ preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Stimuli of mothers speaking to their infants and to an adult in North American English were created using seminaturalistic laboratory-based audio recordings. Infants’ relative preference for IDS and ADS was assessed across 67 laboratories in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia using the three common methods for measuring infants’ discrimination (head-turn preference, central fixation, and eye tracking). The overall meta-analytic effect size (Cohen’s d) was 0.35, 95% confidence interval = [0.29, 0.42], which was reliably above zero but smaller than the meta-analytic mean computed from previous literature (0.67). The IDS preference was significantly stronger in older children, in those children for whom the stimuli matched their native language and dialect, and in data from labs using the head-turn preference procedure. Together, these findings replicate the IDS preference but suggest that its magnitude is modulated by development, native-language experience, and testing procedure.

Older children with online schooling requirements, unsurprisingly, were reported to have increased screen time during the first COVID-19 lockdown in many countries. Here, we ask whether younger children with no similar online schooling requirements also had increased screen time during lockdown. We examined children’s screen time during the first COVID-19 lockdown in a large cohort (n = 2209) of 8-to-36-month-olds sampled from 15 labs across 12 countries. Caregivers reported that toddlers with no online schooling requirements were exposed to more screen time during lockdown than before lockdown. While this was exacerbated for countries with longer lockdowns, there was no evidence that the increase in screen time during lockdown was associated with socio-demographic variables, such as child age and socio-economic status (SES). However, screen time during lockdown was negatively associated with SES and positively associated with child age, caregiver screen time, and attitudes towards children’s screen time. The results highlight the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on young children’s screen time.

If hearers are sensitive to Gricean maxims of Quantity (Grice, 1975(Grice, /1989, they should disfavour expressions which give too little or too much information for the unique identification of an intended referent. Accordingly, cooperative speakers are expected to provide all and only as much information as is necessary for their interlocutor to uniquely identify a referent. Engelhardt et al. (2006) report that speakers and hearers are sensitive to under-informativeness but not to over-informativeness. Based on this finding, the authors re-interpret the literature which claims to document pragmatic effects in language comprehension and instead attribute previous findings to structural-lexical biases. We argue that the reason why speakers and hearers seemed insensitive to over-informativeness in Engelhardt et al.'s studies was because certain aspects of their experiments favoured the use of redundant information. Our experiments 1 and 2 manipulate these factors, revealing that hearers are in fact sensitive to violations of over-as well as under-informativeness. A further production experiment shows that speakers do not under-or over-specify when the factors that favoured over-informativeness in Engelhardt et al.'s study are removed. The findings provide evidence that speakers and hearers are sensitive to both Quantity maxims, and suggest that the effects obtained in previous literature should indeed be attributed to pragmatic factors.