The Trouble With Quantifiers: Exploring Children's Deficits in Scalar Implicature

• Main Authors: Frank, M.C (Author), Horowitz, A.C (Author), Schneider, R.M (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Blackwell Publishing Inc. 2018
• Subjects: adult; article; child; Child Language; Child, Preschool; comprehension; Comprehension; cookie; female; Female; human; Humans; language development; Logistic Models; major clinical study; male; Male; preschool child; semantics; Semantics; statistical model
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 Adults routinely use the context of utterances to infer a meaning beyond the literal semantics of their words (e.g., inferring from “She ate some of the cookies” that she ate some, but not all). Contrasting children's (N = 209) comprehension of scalar implicatures using quantifiers with contextually derived ad hoc implicatures revealed that 4- to 5-year-olds reliably computed ad hoc, but not scalar, implicatures (Experiment 1). Unexpectedly, performance with “some” and “none” was correlated (Experiments 1 and 2). An individual differences study revealed a correlation between quantifier knowledge and implicature success (Experiment 3); a control study ruled out other factors (Experiment 4). These findings suggest that some failures with scalar implicatures may be rooted in a lack of semantic knowledge rather than general pragmatic or processing demands. © 2017 The Authors. Child Development © 2017 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.