‘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.