Ad-hoc Implicature in Preschool Children

Abstract

If a speaker tells us that “some guests were late to the party,” we typically infer that not all were. Implicatures, in which an ambiguous statement (“some and possibly all”) is strengthened pragmatically (to “some and not all”), are a paradigm case of pragmatic reasoning. Inferences of this sort are difficult for young children, but recent work suggests that this mismatch may stem from issues in understanding the relationship between lexical items such as “some” and “all” rather than broader pragmatic deficits. We tested children’s ability to make nonquantificational pragmatic inferences by constructing contextually derived “ad-hoc” implicatures, using sets of pictures with contrasting features. We found that 4-year-olds and some 3-year-olds were able to make implicatures successfully using these displays. Hence, apparent failures in scalar implicature are likely due to difficulties specific to the constructions and tasks used in previous work; these difficulties may have masked aspects of children’s underlying pragmatic competence.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Janelle Klaas for assistance in data collection and to Cindy Fisher and three anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions. A previous version of this work was presented to the Cognitive Science Society in Stiller, Goodman, and Frank (2011).

Notes

¹ Data and code used in these analyses are available at http://github.com/langcog/scales.

² We acknowledge that this interpretation of numbers as being pragmatically upper-bounded is controversial, but cite it for the sake of completeness.