Children's acceptance of underinformative sentences: The case of some as a determiner

Abstract

In recent literature there is unanimous agreement about children's pragmatic competence in drawing scalar implicatures about some, if the task is made easy enough. However, children accept infelicitous some sentences more often than adults do. In general their acceptance is assumed to be synonymous with a logical interpretation of some as a quantifier. But in our view an overlap with some as a determiner in under-informative sentences cannot be ruled out, given the ambiguity of the experimental instructions and the attitude of trust by children in adults. Our study investigated this hypothesis with different experimental manipulations. We found that when the experimenter's intentions are clear (Experiment 1, all/some order effect; Experiments 2 and 4, conditions 2 and 3), under-informative sentences are usually rejected; otherwise (Experiment 1, some/all order effect; Experiments 3 and 4, control condition) they are accepted. However, analysis of verbal protocols indicated that pragmatically infelicitous sentences are accepted, with some interpreted mostly as a determiner, irrespective of the function of some as a quantifier. Acceptance is not in itself synonymous with a logical interpretation of some as a quantifier.

Keywords:

• Children's pragmatic competence
• Scalar implicatures
• Some
• Quantifiers
• Determiners

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to Giuseppe Mosconi for his comments on a previous draft of this paper.

Notes

¹Interactional intelligence is related to Gardner's concept of “personal intelligence” (1983) and to Goody's “anticipatory interactive planning” (AIP) (1995). By “anticipatory interactive planning” (AIP) Goody means: “the higher primates, and men, have the ability to model this interdependence of one's own and others' behaviour at the cognitive level” (1995, p. 2).

²“Determiners are modifiers which combine with nouns to produce expressions whose reference is thereby determined in terms of the identity of the referent; quantifiers are modifiers which combine with nouns to produce expressions whose reference is thereby determined in terms of the size of the set of individuals” (Lyons, 1977, pp. 454–55). For a formal treatment of the determiner function of some, see also Larson and Segal (1995).

³On this topic, see Nisbett and Wilson (1977) and, for an alternative view, Eriksson and Simon (1980).

⁴The determiner function of some may apply as long as the property exists. Possibly, for children, the existence of the property is of greater relevance than its generality (as one of our referees suggested).

⁵See also Sala et al. (2006), who conveyed the quantifying function of some by showing three pictures with a different number of long-necked giraffes (all/some/none).

⁶The presentation order was randomised in literature (e.g., Guasti et al., 2005; Noveck, 2001; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003), in order to neutralise its effects.

⁷In Italian: Alcuni bottoni sono rossi/tutti i bottoni sono rossi.

⁸In Italian: In questa scatola alcuni (tutti i) bottoni sono rossi.

⁹In Italian: Alcuni (tutti i) bottoni di questa scatola sono rossi.

¹⁰Our order effect results (the increase in False responses with infelicitous some) may have been due to children having already given a True response (with all). But if this were the real rate for False responses, a similar effect should also be produced when all follows some and some is accepted as True. To test this point further, we ran another experiment where the phrase with some (“Some buttons are red”) was preceded by a False All statement (“All buttons are square”) in a box with red buttons, some square shaped and some round. The results again show a significant effect depending on the presentation order. A Fisher exact test showed no significant difference between the two conditions in terms of sentence acceptance (“True” answers) for both age groups (7-year-olds: p = 1; 10-year-olds: p = .605).

¹¹True answers with adults were also found by Noveck (2001: 41%), Bott & Noveck (2004: 41%), Feeney et al. (2004: 65%), and Pouscoulous et al. (2007: 53%).

¹²We also tested another 20 adult participants with the All-Some condition of the target version; 90% of them gave False responses, just like the 7- and 10-year-olds.

¹³In Sala et al. (2006), when a prototypical property (having a long neck) was contextualised by a few elements (a picture with four long-necked giraffes, and a second picture with two long-necked giraffes and two short-necked giraffes), a different meaning of some as a determiner emerged. The acceptance of the target sentence revealed the demonstrative function of the determiner. The verbalisations were: “True/Yes, these are the giraffes with the long necks”, pointing to the picture with the four long-necked giraffes.

¹⁴The spontaneous justifications were as follows, with the number of participants in brackets: “It's true because not all the snowflakes are white” (1), “I agree because the smallest snowflakes don't seem white” (1), “Probably some snowflakes are grey because of air pollution” (1), “When it is freezing, some snowflakes are icy” (1), “It's true because when the snowflakes fall down usually they become dirty and are not white anymore” (2), “There is ice, and then some snowflakes become ice” (2), “True, because there is air pollution” (2).

¹⁵To avoid the potential constraints of the pictorial representation, we submitted to 20 children aged 9 only the sentence At the North Pole, some snowflakes are white, and we obtained similar results: 50% of the participants agreed and 50% disagreed. The verbal protocols were similar to those observed in Experiments 3 and 4.

¹⁶Papafragou and Musolino (2003), for instance, make the aim of the task clear by telling the children that the puppet sometimes says “silly things” and that the purpose of the game is to help the puppet “say things better”.

¹⁷There is general agreement in the literature (Guasti et al., 2005; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003) that this kind of task “demands no small amount of work as it requires children to compare an utterance to real-world knowledge” (Noveck, 2001, p. 184).

¹⁸In Italian: Alcuni elefanti hanno la proboscide. Al Polo Nord, alcuni fiocchi di neve sono bianchi. Alcuni cerchi sono rotondi.

¹⁹The rates of False responses to the sentences in second and third position were 20 for 7-year-olds; and 21 and 22, respectively, for 10-year-olds.

²⁰The sentences in second position were judged False by 20 participants aged 7 and 22 participants aged 10; the sentences in third position were judged False by 22 participants aged 7 and 10.

²¹The literature offers some interesting, but contrasting, accounts of why adults tend to be more pragmatic than children (see footnote 11). In particular, through use of reaction times (RTs), Noveck and Posada (2003) show that overall adults' logical and also pragmatic responses to under-informative statements reflect two sorts of strategies; the crucial point for this perspective is that the increase in reaction times “reflects the effortful processing necessary for drawing pragmatic inferences. On the other hand, Feeney et al. (2004, p. 129) found that “the mean time taken to produce a logical response to infelicitous some statements was significantly longer than the other means involved”. This suggests that the undoing of the implicature is effortful. Feeney's explanation for this phenomenon is that these participants inhibited the pragmatic response, thanks to their higher cognitive capacity.