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Children’s and Adults’ Sensitivity to Gricean Maxims and to the Maximize Presupposition Principle

Up to age 5, children are known to experience difficulties in the derivation of implicitly conveyed content, sticking to literally true, even if underinformative, interpretation of sentences. The computation of implicated meanings is connected to the (apparent or manifest) violation of Gricean conve...

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Autores principales: Panzeri, Francesca, Foppolo, Francesca
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7966462/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33746845
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.624628
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author Panzeri, Francesca
Foppolo, Francesca
author_facet Panzeri, Francesca
Foppolo, Francesca
author_sort Panzeri, Francesca
collection PubMed
description Up to age 5, children are known to experience difficulties in the derivation of implicitly conveyed content, sticking to literally true, even if underinformative, interpretation of sentences. The computation of implicated meanings is connected to the (apparent or manifest) violation of Gricean conversational maxims. We present a study that tests unmotivated violations of the maxims of Quantity, Relevance, and Manner and of the Maximize Presupposition principle, with a Truth Value Judgment task with three options of response. We tested pre-schoolers and school-aged children, with adults as controls, to verify at which age these pragmatic rules are recognized and to see whether there is a difference among these tenets. We found an evolutionary trend and that, in all age groups, violations of the maxims of Quantity and of Relation are sanctioned to a higher degree compared to infringements of the Maim of Manner and of the Maximize Presupposition principle. We conjecture that this relates to the effects that the violation of a certain maxim or principle has on the goals of the exchange: listeners are less tolerant with statements that transmit inaccurate or incomplete information, while being more tolerant with those that still permit to understand what has happened.
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spelling pubmed-79664622021-03-18 Children’s and Adults’ Sensitivity to Gricean Maxims and to the Maximize Presupposition Principle Panzeri, Francesca Foppolo, Francesca Front Psychol Psychology Up to age 5, children are known to experience difficulties in the derivation of implicitly conveyed content, sticking to literally true, even if underinformative, interpretation of sentences. The computation of implicated meanings is connected to the (apparent or manifest) violation of Gricean conversational maxims. We present a study that tests unmotivated violations of the maxims of Quantity, Relevance, and Manner and of the Maximize Presupposition principle, with a Truth Value Judgment task with three options of response. We tested pre-schoolers and school-aged children, with adults as controls, to verify at which age these pragmatic rules are recognized and to see whether there is a difference among these tenets. We found an evolutionary trend and that, in all age groups, violations of the maxims of Quantity and of Relation are sanctioned to a higher degree compared to infringements of the Maim of Manner and of the Maximize Presupposition principle. We conjecture that this relates to the effects that the violation of a certain maxim or principle has on the goals of the exchange: listeners are less tolerant with statements that transmit inaccurate or incomplete information, while being more tolerant with those that still permit to understand what has happened. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-03-03 /pmc/articles/PMC7966462/ /pubmed/33746845 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.624628 Text en Copyright © 2021 Panzeri and Foppolo. 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
Panzeri, Francesca
Foppolo, Francesca
Children’s and Adults’ Sensitivity to Gricean Maxims and to the Maximize Presupposition Principle
title Children’s and Adults’ Sensitivity to Gricean Maxims and to the Maximize Presupposition Principle
title_full Children’s and Adults’ Sensitivity to Gricean Maxims and to the Maximize Presupposition Principle
title_fullStr Children’s and Adults’ Sensitivity to Gricean Maxims and to the Maximize Presupposition Principle
title_full_unstemmed Children’s and Adults’ Sensitivity to Gricean Maxims and to the Maximize Presupposition Principle
title_short Children’s and Adults’ Sensitivity to Gricean Maxims and to the Maximize Presupposition Principle
title_sort children’s and adults’ sensitivity to gricean maxims and to the maximize presupposition principle
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7966462/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33746845
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.624628
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