Scalar implicatures: experiments at the semantics–pragmatics interface

Abstract

In this article we present two sets of experiments designed to investigate the acquisition of scalar implicatures. Scalar implicatures arise in examples like Some professors are famous where the speaker's use of some typically indicates that s/he had reasons not to use a more informative term, e.g. all. Some professors are famous therefore gives rise to the implicature that not all professors are famous. Recent studies on the development of pragmatics suggest that preschool children are often insensitive to such implicatures when they interpret scalar terms (Cognition 78 (2001) 165; Chierchia, G., Crain, S., Guasti, M.T., Gualmini, A., & Meroni, L. (2001). The acquisition of disjunction: evidence for a grammatical view of scalar implicatures. In A.H.-J. Do, L. Dominguez, & A. Johansen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 25th Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 157-168). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press; Musolino, J., & Lidz, J. (2002). Preschool logic: truth and felicity in the acquisition of quantification. In B. Skarabela, S. Fish, & A.H.-J. Do, Proceedings of the 26th Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 406-416). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press). This conclusion raises two important questions: (a) are all scalar terms treated in the same way by young children?, and (b) does the child's difficulty reflect a genuine inability to derive scalar implicatures or is it due to demands imposed by the experimental task on an otherwise pragmatically savvy child? Experiment 1 addresses the first question by testing a group of 30 5-year-olds and 30 adults (all native speakers of Greek) on three different scales, <oli, meriki> (<all, some>), <tris, dio> (<three, two>) and <teliono, arxizo> (<finish, start>). In each case, subjects were presented with contexts which satisfied the semantic content of the stronger (i.e. more informative) terms on each scale (i.e. all, three and finish) but were described using the weaker terms of the scales (i.e. some, two, start). We found that, while adults overwhelmingly rejected these infelicitous descriptions, children almost never did so. Children also differed from adults in that their rejection rate on the numerical scale was reliably higher than on the two other scales. In order to address question (b), we trained a group of 30 5-year-olds to detect infelicitous statements. We then presented them with modified versions of the stories of Experiment 1, which now more readily invited scalar inferences. These manipulations gave rise to significantly higher rejection rates than those observed in Experiment 1. Overall, these findings indicate that children do not treat all scalar terms alike and, more importantly, that children's ability to derive scalar implicatures is affected by their awareness of the goal of the task. Developmental and methodological implications as well as theoretical implications for the semantics of numeral terms are discussed.

Online interpretation of scalar quantifiers: Insight into the semantics–pragmatics interface

“…However, relative to adults, looks to the target occurred at a later time window and likely reflects children's difficulty in overcoming initial bias to fixate on cards with greater quantities. All together, these results suggest that children, perhaps more so than adults, rely heavily on the logical meaning when interpreting utterances (Noveck, 2001;Papafragou & Musolino, 2003). Further investigation will be needed to explore whether children ever perform these pragmatic inferences over the course of real-time speech comprehension.…”

“…If children's acquisition of words and structures are initially guided by the understanding of speaker's intent (Tomasello, 1998), we might expect that they would be more inclined to interpret words pragmatically or might initially misinterpret the upper-bound as part of the word's meaning. In contrast, studies using explicit judgment tasks suggest that children are more literal than adults (Noveck, 2001;Papafragou & Musolino, 2003).…”

“…He found that while adults overwhelmingly rejected the weaker modal, 7-to 9-year-olds treated the statement to be logically compatible with the stronger statement. Similarly, Papafragou and Musolino (2003) found that five-year-olds, but not adults, were content to accept weak scalar predicates like started in situations where the stronger scalar term applied (i.e. finished).…”

Evidentiality in language and cognition

“…The ability to rank evidential sources may be within the capacities of 3-and 4-yearolds (Whitcombe & Robinson, 2000), but the derivation of pragmatic effects from the use of different evidential markers is more complex and requires subtle reasoning about the communicative intentions of the speaker. There is independent evidence that pragmatic effects from linguistic scales may be diffcult for preschool children (Noveck, 2001;Papafragou & Musolino, 2003). If so, we would expect diffculties with the pragmatic effects of evidential scales to extend well beyond the acquisition of the lexical/grammatical meaning of specific evidentials.…”

Bootstrapping in a language of thought: A formal model of numerical concept learning

“…In natural language use, though, numerals can often receive an interpretation of at least one: if there are six professors are named "Mark," then it is also true that there are three named "Mark." There is some evidence that children's meanings of numbers are exact (Papafragou & Musolino, 2003;Barner, Chow, & Yang, 2009;Huang, Snedeker, & Spelke, 2004), in which case the exactness assumptions of the model would be justified. This leaves open the question of how children learn the scalar implicatures common in numerical meanings, and how such pragmatic phenomena relate to pragmatics in other determiners and language more generally.…”