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Development of Quantitative and Temporal Scalar Implicatures in a Felicity Judgment Task

Experimental investigations into children’s interpretation of scalar terms show that children have difficulties with scalar implicatures in tasks. In contrast with adults, they are for instance not able to derive the pragmatic interpretation that “some” means “not all” (Noveck, 2001; Papafragou and...

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Autores principales: Schaeken, Walter, Schouten, Bojoura, Dieussaert, Kristien
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6387925/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30833924
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02763
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author Schaeken, Walter
Schouten, Bojoura
Dieussaert, Kristien
author_facet Schaeken, Walter
Schouten, Bojoura
Dieussaert, Kristien
author_sort Schaeken, Walter
collection PubMed
description Experimental investigations into children’s interpretation of scalar terms show that children have difficulties with scalar implicatures in tasks. In contrast with adults, they are for instance not able to derive the pragmatic interpretation that “some” means “not all” (Noveck, 2001; Papafragou and Musolino, 2003). However, there is also substantial experimental evidence that children are not incapable of drawing scalar inferences and that they are aware of the pragmatic potential of scalar expressions. In these kinds of studies, the prime interest is to discover what conditions facilitate implicature production for children. One of the factors that seem to be difficult for children is the generation of the scalar alternative. In a Felicity Judgment Task (FJT) the alternative is given. Participants are presented with a pair of utterances and asked to choose the most felicitous description. In such a task, even 5-year-old children are reported to show a very good performance. Our study wants to build on this tradition, by using a FJT where not only “some-all” choices are given, but also “some-many” and “many-all.” In combination with a manipulation of the number of successes/failures in the stories, this enabled us to construct control, critical and ambiguous items. We compared the performance of 59 5-year-old children with that of 34 11-year-old children. The results indicated that performance of both age groups was clearly above chance, replicating previous findings. However, for the 5-year-old children, the critical and ambiguous items were more difficult than the control items and they also performed worse on these two types of items than the 11-year-old children. Interestingly with respect to the issue of scalar diversity, the 11-year-old children were also presented temporal items, which turned out to be more difficult than the quantitative ones.
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spelling pubmed-63879252019-03-04 Development of Quantitative and Temporal Scalar Implicatures in a Felicity Judgment Task Schaeken, Walter Schouten, Bojoura Dieussaert, Kristien Front Psychol Psychology Experimental investigations into children’s interpretation of scalar terms show that children have difficulties with scalar implicatures in tasks. In contrast with adults, they are for instance not able to derive the pragmatic interpretation that “some” means “not all” (Noveck, 2001; Papafragou and Musolino, 2003). However, there is also substantial experimental evidence that children are not incapable of drawing scalar inferences and that they are aware of the pragmatic potential of scalar expressions. In these kinds of studies, the prime interest is to discover what conditions facilitate implicature production for children. One of the factors that seem to be difficult for children is the generation of the scalar alternative. In a Felicity Judgment Task (FJT) the alternative is given. Participants are presented with a pair of utterances and asked to choose the most felicitous description. In such a task, even 5-year-old children are reported to show a very good performance. Our study wants to build on this tradition, by using a FJT where not only “some-all” choices are given, but also “some-many” and “many-all.” In combination with a manipulation of the number of successes/failures in the stories, this enabled us to construct control, critical and ambiguous items. We compared the performance of 59 5-year-old children with that of 34 11-year-old children. The results indicated that performance of both age groups was clearly above chance, replicating previous findings. However, for the 5-year-old children, the critical and ambiguous items were more difficult than the control items and they also performed worse on these two types of items than the 11-year-old children. Interestingly with respect to the issue of scalar diversity, the 11-year-old children were also presented temporal items, which turned out to be more difficult than the quantitative ones. Frontiers Media S.A. 2019-02-18 /pmc/articles/PMC6387925/ /pubmed/30833924 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02763 Text en Copyright © 2019 Schaeken, Schouten and Dieussaert. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Schaeken, Walter
Schouten, Bojoura
Dieussaert, Kristien
Development of Quantitative and Temporal Scalar Implicatures in a Felicity Judgment Task
title Development of Quantitative and Temporal Scalar Implicatures in a Felicity Judgment Task
title_full Development of Quantitative and Temporal Scalar Implicatures in a Felicity Judgment Task
title_fullStr Development of Quantitative and Temporal Scalar Implicatures in a Felicity Judgment Task
title_full_unstemmed Development of Quantitative and Temporal Scalar Implicatures in a Felicity Judgment Task
title_short Development of Quantitative and Temporal Scalar Implicatures in a Felicity Judgment Task
title_sort development of quantitative and temporal scalar implicatures in a felicity judgment task
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6387925/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30833924
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02763
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