Semantic meaning and pragmatic interpretation in 5-year-olds: Evidence from real-time spoken language comprehension.

Abstract

Recent research on children's inferencing has found that although adults typically adopt the pragmatic interpretation of some (implying not all), 5- to 9-year-olds often prefer the semantic interpretation of the quantifier (meaning possibly all). Do these failures reflect a breakdown of pragmatic competence or the metalinguistic demands of prior tasks? In 3 experiments, the authors used the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm to elicit an implicit measure of adults' and children's abilities to generate scalar implicatures. Although adults' eye-movements indicated that adults had interpreted some with the pragmatic inference, children's looks suggested that children persistently interpreted some as compatible with all (Experiment 1). Nevertheless, both adults and children were able to quickly reject competitors that were inconsistent with the semantics of some; this confirmed the sensitivity of the paradigm (Experiment 2). Finally, adults, but not children, successfully distinguished between situations that violated the scalar implicature and those that did not (Experiment 3). These data demonstrate that children interpret quantifiers on the basis of their semantic content and fail to generate scalar implicatures during online language comprehension.

Referring expressions and structural language abilities in children with specific language impairment: A pragmatic tolerance account

“…It has been suggested that their production of under-informative referring expressions prior to this age is due to a lack of awareness of other potential targets in the environment (Whitehurst, 1976) or because they don't realise that to refer means to implicitly describe differences that will eliminate potential ambiguity (Whitehurst & Sonnenschein, 1981). Likewise, in comprehension, children are able to use the presence of modification to make early inferences about an intended target by five years of age (Huang & Snedeker, 2009), and will seek clarification of underinformative expressions at around the same age (Nadig & Sedivy, 2002).…”

Presupposition and Implicature

“…However, it is not clear that scalar implicatures are as prevalent as this approach would have it (Paris, 1973;Geurts, 2009). The debate between (neo-)Griceanism and defaultism has been the subject of experimental work recently (Breheny et al, 2006;Huang & Snedeker, 2009;Grodner et al, 2010;Stiller et al, 2011), with suggestive but inconclusive results. 4 Conventional implicature Grice (1975) defines two major classes of meaning that are supposed to fall outside of "what is said (in the favored sense)": conversational implicatures, discussed above, and conventional implicatures.…”

Pragmática y metapragmática en lengua materna. ¿Qué nos dicen los datos experimentales sobre su adquisición?

“…Algunos autores (Noveck, 2001, 2004, Huang & Snedeker 2009Gualmini, Crain, Meroni, Chierchia & Guasti 2001) han afirmado que la adquisición es serial, de tal modo que en una primera fase se centra en la información semántica y solo en un momento posterior se adquiere la competencia pragmática. Dicho de otro modo, estos autores consideran que los niños se comportan de modo más lógico que los adultos.…”