Children's Acquisition of Homogeneity in Plural Definite Descriptions

Tieu, Lyn; Križ, Manuel; Chemla, Emmanuel

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02329

Cited by 16 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…Previous experimental studies have employed this type of ternary task with children and have shown that they can make use of the middle reward appropriately. In particular, similar to adults, children appear to distinguish between clearly false controls, to which they give the minimal reward, and target items, for which they tend to use the middle value (see Katsos &Bishop 2011 andTieu et al 2017a).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 96%

The abundance inference of pluralised mass nouns is an implicature: Evidence from Greek

Renans

Romoli

Makri

et al. 2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Across languages, plural marking on count nouns typically gives rise to a multiplicity inference, indicating that the noun ranges over sums with a cardinality of 2 or more. Plural marking has also been observed to occur on mass nouns in Greek and a few other languages, giving rise to a parallel abundance inference, indicating that there is a lot of the relevant substance. It has been observed in the literature that both of these inferences disappear in downward-entailing environments, such as when a plural appears in the scope of negation (Tsoulas 2009; Kane et al. 2015). There are two main competing approaches in the literature that aim to account for the described pattern with respect to multiplicity inferences: the ambiguity approach (Farkas & de Swart 2010) and the implicature approach (Sauerland 2003; Spector 2007; Mayr 2015, among others). As discussed in Tieu et al. (2018), while both approaches can account for the upward-versus downward-entailing pattern of multiplicity inferences, they differ in what they predict with respect to the acquisition of these inferences and their relationship with implicatures. Tieu et al. (2014; 2018) investigated multiplicity inferences in English and reported evidence for the implicature approach. In this paper, we first show how the ambiguity approach and the implicature approach to the multiplicity inference can be extended to account for the abundance inference. We then report on an experiment that tests the predictions of the two approaches for multiplicity and abundance inferences in preschool-aged children and adult native speakers of Greek. Our results replicate the patterns reported in Tieu et al. (2014; 2018) for multiplicity inferences, and crucially reveal an analogous pattern for abundance inferences. Adults computed both kinds of inferences more in upward-entailing environments than in downward-entailing ones, and children computed fewer inferences overall than adults did. These results reflect an overall pattern of implicature calculation in line with a unified implicature analysis across the three kinds of inferences. By contrast, we discuss how they pose a challenge for the ambiguity approach.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 96%

The abundance inference of pluralised mass nouns is an implicature: Evidence from Greek

Renans

Romoli

Makri

et al. 2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…Crucially, they do assign the correct interpretation to quantified nominals like "all the things in the bucket", that are rarely used non-maximally in adult languages. Karmiloff-Smith (1981) and Tieu et al (2019) reach a similar conclusion about child French, further suggesting that maximality emerges fairly late in acquisition, reportedly after 6 years of age.…”

Section: Why Are Children Overly Permissive?mentioning

confidence: 74%

“…If this explanation is on the right track, then Pattern 1 may ultimately have the same source as children's well-known difficulty computing certain scalar implicatures until age six or seven, in particular, implicatures derived on the basis of alternatives generated by replacing one word of the assertion (e.g., some in I ate some cookies) by some other lexical material associated with it (e.g., all) (see, e.g., Chierchia et al 2001;Gualmini et al 2001;Noveck 2001). A similar line of reasoning has been used to explain children's failure to enforce maximality in their interpretation of plural definites by Tieu et al (2019). These authors build on Magri's (2014) proposal for deriving maximality effects for plural definites "the N", interpreted as "all the N", as a scalar implicature.…”

Section: Why Are Children Overly Permissive?mentioning

confidence: 95%

Children’s non-adultlike interpretations of telic predicates across languages

et al. 2020

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The acquisition literature has documented several different types of misinterpretations of telic sentences by children, yet a comprehensive analysis of these child interpretations has not been attempted and a crosslinguistic perspective is lacking. This task is not easy, for, on the surface, children’s non-adultlike interpretations appear to be scattered and even contradictory across languages. Several cognitive biases have been proposed to explain given patterns (children initially adhere to a Manner bias, or alternatively a Result bias). Reviewing a wide range of studies on the acquisition of telic sentences in relation to tense-aspect markers, we show that children’s non-adultlike interpretations fall into three different patterns. We conclude that the diversity of non-adultlike interpretations that is found across child languages is incompatible with accounts that rely on these cognitive, language-independent principles, but instead is triggered by language-specific properties. Analyzing these patterns in detail, it appears that child learners across languages have problems with tense-aspect forms with variable meanings, in contrast to forms with a one-to-one form/meaning mappings which are acquired earlier. While adults use a context-sensitive interpretation of forms with multiple meanings, various semantic-pragmatic sources can explain children’s difficulties with interpreting such forms. All explanations that we identify across child languages rely on children’s immature command of pragmatic reasoning, albeit in very different ways for the three different patterns. Thus, by taking a crosslinguistic semantic approach and integrating detailed insights from the tense-aspect semantics of specific languages with universal pragmatic effects, we explain the non-adultlike interpretation of telic sentences in a variety of child languages in a comprehensive way.

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“…In recent years, a variety of studies have used a ternary judgment task to investigate implicatures (Katsos & Bishop 2011;Tieu et al 2017a;Renans et al 2018), presuppositions (Abrusan & Szendroi 2013), and homogeneity (Križ & Chemla 2015;Tieu, Kriz & Chemla 2019). As first conceived of in Katsos & Bishop (2011) for implicatures, the idea behind the ternary judgment task is that the lowest valued judgment (e.g., the smallest reward) is reserved for false sentences, the highest valued judgment (e.g., the biggest reward) is reserved for true and felicitous sentences, and the intermediate judgment is meant for true but infelicitous sentences, e.g., sentences with a true literal meaning but a false implicature.…”

Section: Previous Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Homogeneity or implicature: An experimental investigation of free choice

Tieu

Bill

Romoli

2019

SALT

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A sentence containing disjunction in the scope of a possibility modal, such as Angie is allowed to buy the boat or the car, gives rise to the FREE CHOICE inference that Angie can freely choose between the two. This inference poses a well-known puzzle, in that it is not predicted by a standard treatment of modals and disjunction (e.g., Kamp 1974). To complicate things further, FREE CHOICE tends to disappear under negation: Angie is not allowed to buy the boat or the car doesn’t merely convey the negation of free choice, but rather the stronger DUAL PROHIBITION reading that Angie cannot buy either one. There are two main approaches to the FREE CHOICE-DUAL PROHIBITION pattern in the literature. While they both capture the relevant data points, they make a testable, divergent prediction regarding the status of positive and negative sentences in a context in which Angie can only buy one of the two objects, e.g., the boat. In particular, the implicature-based approach (e.g., Fox 2007; Klinedinst 2007; Bar-Lev & Fox 2017) predicts that the positive sentence is true in such a context, but associated with a false implicature, while it predicts the negative sentence to be straightforwardly false. The alternative approach (e.g., Aloni 2018; Goldstein 2018; Willer 2017) predicts both the positive and negative sentences to be equally undefined. Investigating the contrast between these sentences in such a context therefore provides a clear way to address the debate between implicature and non-implicature accounts of FREE CHOICE. We present an experiment aiming to do just this, the results of which present a challenge for the implicature approach. We further discuss how the implicature approach could in theory be developed to account for our results, based on a recent proposal by Enguehard & Chemla (2018) on the distribution of implicatures.

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Children's Acquisition of Homogeneity in Plural Definite Descriptions

Cited by 16 publications

References 52 publications

The abundance inference of pluralised mass nouns is an implicature: Evidence from Greek

The abundance inference of pluralised mass nouns is an implicature: Evidence from Greek

Children’s non-adultlike interpretations of telic predicates across languages

Homogeneity or implicature: An experimental investigation of free choice

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