The Development of Quantity Implicatures in Mandarin-Speaking Children

ABSTRACT

The present study reports a large, cross-sectional study of Mandarin-speaking children’s ability to compute quantity implicatures. To chart the developmental trajectory of this pragmatic ability, we tested 225 Mandarin-speaking children aged 4–8 years on their interpretations of scalar and non-scalar implicatures, as well as numerals. Scalar implicatures were difficult and we did not observe consistent success until age 6. In contrast, by 4 years of age this group was already able to compute non-scalar implicatures and the exact readings of numerals at adult-like rates. The implications of the current findings are discussed in relation to children’s development of pragmatic inference, highlighting the relevance of cross-linguistic data in understanding pragmatic development.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ For clarity of exposition, we follow the classic Gricean analysis of implicature, while acknowledging that a wide variety of other analyses are present in the literature (e.g., Goodman & Frank, 2016; Levinson, 2000; Sperber & Wilson, 1986).

² Katsos and Bishop (2011) claimed that 5-year-old English children were not only sensitive to the pragmatic under-informativeness, but also capable of deriving scalar implicatures. On this account, the reason why children sometimes accepted under-informative statements containing the weak scalar terms was that they are more pragmatically tolerant than adults. In the current paper, we agree with the pragmatic sensitivity of children. However, we are agnostic about whether children younger than 5 years of age are capable of computing scalar implicatures – as will be seen, we do not find evidence for that in our task.

³ An anonymous reviewer worried that the practice trials with only would facilitate the derivation of non-scalar implicatures in the actual test session of the experiment. In order to exclude this possibility, we have tested 20 additional age-matched 4-year-old Mandarin-speaking children with the same 24 test trials in the non-scalar zhuang-le condition. At this time, each picture stimulus of the practice trials has three boxes, each of which contains one distinct object, and the sentence stimulus was “My box contains xx,” referring to one of the boxes clearly. The results showed that the 4-year-olds chose the non-scalar-implicature-consistent target box 96.67% of the time, which is not significantly different from the results of the original experiment.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.U20B2062) to Peng Zhou and by National Science Foundation (146077) to Michael C. Frank. The authors thank Dr. Noah Goodman for his comments on the idea of testing Mandarin-speaking children on non-scalar implicatures. The authors would also like to thank the children and the teachers at the primary school attached to the Lianyungang Teachers’ College Education Group, and at the Taolifangyuan Kindergarten, Beijing, China, for their assistance and support in running the study.