Sentences with disjunction in the scope of a universal quantifier, Every A is P or Q, tend to give rise to distributive inferences that each of the disjuncts holds of at least one individual in the domain of the quantifier, Some A is P & Some A is Q. These inferences are standardly derived as an entailment of the meaning of the sentence together with the scalar implicature that it is not the case that either disjunct holds of every individual (...) in the domain of the quantifier, \Every A is P &\Every A is Q. As we show, this derivation faces a challenge in that distributive inferences may obtain in the absence of plain negated inferences. We address this challenge by showing that on particular assumptions about alternatives, a derivation of distributive inferences as scalar implicatures can be maintained without in fact necessitating plain negated inferences. These assumptions accord naturally with the grammatical approach to scalar implicatures. We also present experimental data that suggest that plain negated inferences are not only unnecessary for deriving distributive inferences, but might in fact be unavailable. (shrink)

We present a series of arguments for logical nativism, focusing mainly on the meaning of disjunction in human languages. We propose that all human languages are logical in the sense that the meaning of linguistic expressions corresponding to disjunction (e.g. English or , Chinese huozhe, Japanese ka ) conform to the meaning of the logical operator in classical logic, inclusive- or . It is highly implausible, we argue, that children acquire the (logical) meaning of disjunction by observing how adults use (...) disjunction. Findings from studies of child language acquisition and from cross-linguistic research invite the conclusion that children do not learn to be logical—it comes naturally to them. (shrink)

The superlative quantifiers, at least and at most, are commonly assumed to have the same truth-conditions as the comparative quantifiers more than and fewer than. However, as Geurts & Nouwen have demonstrated, this is wrong, and several theories have been proposed to account for them. In this paper we propose that superlative quantifiers are illocutionary operators; specifically, they modify meta-speech acts.Meta speech-acts are operators that do not express a speech act, but a willingness to make or refrain from making a (...) certain speech act. The classic example is speech act denegation, e.g. I don't promise to come, where the speaker is explicitly refraining from performing the speech act of promising What denegations do is to delimit the future development of conversation, that is, they delimit future admissible speech acts. Hence we call them meta-speech acts. They are not moves in a game, but rather commitments to behave in certain ways in the future. We formalize the notion of meta speech acts as commitment development spaces, which are rooted graphs: The root of the graph describes the commitment development up to the current point in conversation; the continuations from the root describe the admissible future directions.We define and formalize the meta-speech act GRANT, which indicates that the speaker, while not necessarily subscribing to a proposition, refrains from asserting its negation. We propose that superlative quantifiers are quantifiers over GRANTs. Thus, Mary petted at least three rabbits means that the minimal number n such that the speaker GRANTs that Mary petted n rabbits is n = 3. In other words, the speaker denies that Mary petted two, one, or no rabbits, but GRANTs that she petted more.We formalize this interpretation of superlative quantifiers in terms of commitment development spaces, and show how the truth conditions that are derived from it are partly entailed and partly conversationally implicated. We demonstrates how the theory accounts for a wide variety of phenomena regarding the interpretation of superlative quantifiers, their distribution, and the contexts in which they can be embedded. (shrink)

Recent research has shown that the superlative quantifiers at least and at most do not have the same type of truth conditions as the comparative quantifiers more than and fewer than. We propose that superlative quantifiers are interpreted at the level of speech acts. We relate them to denegations of speech acts, as in I don’t promise to come, which we analyze as excluding the speech act of a promise to come. Calling such conversational acts that affect future permissible speech (...) acts “meta-speech acts,” we introduce the meta-speech act of a GRANT of a proposition as a denial to assert the negation of that proposition. Superlative quantifiers are analyzed as quantifiers over GRANTS. Thus, John petted at least three rabbits means that the minimal number n such that the speaker GRANTs the proposition that John petted n rabbits is n = 3. We formalize this interpretation in terms of commitment states and commitment spaces, and show how the truth conditions that are derived from it are partly entailed and partly conversationally implicated. We demonstrate how the theory accounts for a wide variety of distributional phenomena of superlative quantifiers, including the contexts in which they can be embedded. (shrink)

Prominent accounts of language use (those of Grice, Lewis, Stalnaker, Sperber and Wilson among others) have viewed basic communicative acts as essentially involving the attitudes of the participating agents. Developmental data poses a dilemma for these accounts, since it suggests children below age four are competent communicators but would lack the ability to conceptualise communication if philosophers and linguists are right about what communication is. This paper argues that this dilemma is quite serious and that these prominent accounts would be (...) undermined if an adequate more minimal alternative were available. Just such a minimalist account of communication is offered, drawing on ideas from relevance theory and situation theory. (shrink)

Generic statements express generalizations about categories and present a unique semantic profile that is distinct from quantified statements. This paper reports two studies examining the development of children's intuitions about the semantics of generics and how they differ from statements quantified by all, most, and some. Results reveal that, like adults, preschoolers recognize that generics have flexible truth conditions and are capable of representing a wide range of prevalence levels; and interpret novel generics as having near-universal prevalence implications. Results further (...) show that by age 4, children are beginning to differentiate the meaning of generics and quantified statements; however, even 7- to 11-year-olds are not adultlike in their intuitions about the meaning of most-quantified statements. Overall, these studies suggest that by preschool, children interpret generics in much the same way that adults do; however, mastery of the semantics of quantified statements follows a more protracted course. (shrink)

A standard objection to so-called ‘minimal semantics’ (Borg 2004, 2012, Cappelen and Lepore 2005) is that minimal contents are explanatorily redundant as they play no role in an adequate account of linguistic communication (those making this objection include Levinson 2000, Carston 2002, Recanati 2004). This paper argues that this standard objection is mistaken. Furthermore, I argue that seeing why the objection is mistaken sheds light both on how we should draw the classic Gricean distinction between saying and implicating, and how (...) we should think about the key philosophical notion of assertion. Specifically, it reveals that these ideas are best understood primarily in socio-linguistic terms (resting on the degree of liability a speaker is held to have for linguistically conveyed content). (shrink)

Advocates of linguistic pragmatics often appeal to a principle which Paul Grice called Modified Occam's Razor: ‘Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity’. Superficially, Grice's principle seems a routine application of the principle of parsimony (‘Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity’). But parsimony arguments, though common in science, are notoriously problematic, and their use by Griceans faces numerous objections. This paper argues that Modified Occam's Razor makes considerably more sense in light of certain assumptions about the processes (...) involved in language acquisition, and it describes recent empirical findings that bear these assumptions out. The resulting account solves several difficulties that otherwise confront Grice's principle, and it draws attention to problematic assumptions involved in using parsimony to argue for pragmatic accounts of linguistic phenomena. (shrink)

Advocates of linguistic pragmatics often appeal to a principle which Paul Grice called Modified Occam's Razor: 'Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'. Superficially, Grice's principle seems a routine application of the principle of parsimony ('Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'). But parsimony arguments, though common in science, are notoriously problematic, and their use by Griceans faces numerous objections. This paper argues that Modified Occam's Razor makes considerably more sense in light of certain assumptions about the processes (...) involved in language acquisition, and it describes recent empirical findings that bear these assumptions out. The resulting account solves several difficulties that otherwise confront Grice's principle, and it draws attention to problematic assumptions involved in using parsimony to argue for pragmatic accounts of linguistic phenomena. (shrink)

This paper reports an experimental investigation of presuppositions and scalar implicatures in language acquisition. Recent proposals posit the same mechanisms for generating both types of inferences, in contrast to the traditional view. We used a Covered Box picture selection task to compare the interpretations assigned by two groups of children and by adults, in response to sentences with presuppositions and ones with either ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’ scalar implicatures. The main finding was that the behavior of children and adults differed across (...) inference types. This asymmetry is consistent with the traditional perspective, but poses a challenge for the more recent uniform accounts. We discuss how the latter could be amended to account for these findings, and also relate the findings to previous results on presupposition processing. Finally, we discuss an unexpected difference found between direct and indirect scalar implicatures. (shrink)

To determine what the speaker in a cooperative dialog meant with his assertion, on top of what he explicitly said, it is crucial that we assume that the assertion he gave was optimal. In determining optimal assertions we assume that dialogs are embedded in decision problems (van Rooij 2003) and use backwards induction for calculating them (Benz 2006). In this paper, we show that in terms of our framework we can account for several types of implicatures in a uniform way, (...) suggesting that there is no need for an independent linguistic theory of generalized implicatures. In the final section, we show how we can embed our theory in the framework of signaling games, and how it relates with other game theoretic analyses of implicatures. (shrink)

To determine what the speaker in a cooperative dialog meant with his assertion, on top of what he explicitly said, it is crucial that we assume that the assertion he gave was optimal. In determining optimal assertions we assume that dialogs are embedded in decision problems (van Rooij 2003) and use backwards induction for calculating them (Benz 2006). In this paper, we show that in terms of our framework we can account for several types of implicatures in a uniform way, (...) suggesting that there is no need for an independent linguistic theory of generalized implicatures. In the final section, we show how we can embed our theory in the framework of signaling games, and how it relates with other game theoretic analyses of implicatures. (shrink)

The poor performances of typically developing children younger than 4 in the first-order false-belief task “Maxi and the chocolate” is analyzed from the perspective of conversational pragmatics. An ambiguous question asked by an adult experimenter (perceived as a teacher) can receive different interpretations based on a search for relevance, by which children according to their age attribute different intentions to the questioner, within the limits of their own meta-cognitive knowledge. The adult experimenter tells the child the following story of object-transfer: (...) “Maxi puts his chocolate into the green cupboard before going out to play. In his absence, his mother moves the chocolate from the green cupboard to the blue one.” The child must then predict where Maxi will pick up the chocolate when he returns. To the child, the question from an adult (a knowledgeable person) may seem surprising and can be understood as a question of his own knowledge of the world, rather than on Maxi's mental representations. In our study, without any modification of the initial task, we disambiguate the context of the question by (1) replacing the adult experimenter with a humanoid robot presented as “ignorant” and “slow” but trying to learn and (2) placing the child in the role of a “mentor” (the knowledgeable person). Sixty-two typical children of 3 years-old completed the first-order false belief task “Maxi and the chocolate,” either with a human or with a robot. Results revealed a significantly higher success rate in the robot condition than in the human condition. Thus, young children seem to fail because of the pragmatic difficulty of the first-order task, which causes a difference of interpretation between the young child and the experimenter. (shrink)

This paper brings a developmental perspective to the discussion of a longstanding issue surrounding the proper characterization of presuppositions. On an influential view (Stalnaker in Synthese 22(1–2):272–289, 1970; Stalnaker, in Milton, Unger (eds) Semantics and philosophy, New York University Press, New York, 1974; Karttunen in Theor Linguist 1:181–194, 1974), formal presuppositions reflect admittance conditions: an utterance of a sentence which presupposes _p_ is admitted by a conversational context _c_ only if _p_ is common ground in _c_. The theory distinguishes two (...) modes of satisfying this formal requirement: (i) presuppositions may have common ground status prior to utterance, or (ii) they may achieve common ground status post hoc, via accommodation, an adjustment of the common ground by cooperative listeners so as to meet the requirements of an uttered sentence. While intuitive and general, the theory has been criticized (among other things) on methodological grounds (see e.g. Gazdar in Pragmatics: implicature, presupposition and logical form, Academic Press, New York, 1979): the availability of accommodation makes it difficult to empirically examine the notion of presupposition as admittance conditions because a central tenet—pragmatic infelicity results whenever _c_ does not entail _p_—may be masked due to the pragmatic sophistication of language users. In this paper, we argue that child language presents an opportunity to avoid this intrinsic difficulty. In a series of behavioral experiments, we show that young children generate a default expectation that the presuppositions of an asserted sentence have common ground status prior to utterance. Furthermore and more tellingly, we also find that even when accommodation is the preferred option for adults, children fail to accommodate presuppositions in an adult-like manner. This pattern of behavior, we argue, is expected under the admittance theory: in a population where the interference from accommodation is reduced, the impact of failing to satisfy the formal admittance conditions becomes directly observable. (shrink)

Abstract: The Gricean theory of conversational implicature has always been plagued by data suggesting that what would seem to be conversational inferences may occur within the scope of operators like believe , for example; which for bona fide implicatures should be an impossibility. Concentrating my attention on scalar implicatures, I argue that, for the most part, such observations can be accounted for within a Gricean framework, and without resorting to local pragmatic inferences of any kin d. However, there remains a (...) small class of marked cases that cannot be treated as conversational implicatures, and they do require a local mode of pragmatic interpretation. (shrink)

The Gricean theory of conversational implicature has always been plagued by data suggesting that what would seem to be conversational inferences may occur within the scope of operators likebelieve, for example; which for bona fide implicatures should be an impossibility. Concentrating my attention on scalar implicatures, I argue that, for the most part, such observations can be accounted for within a Gricean framework, and without resorting to local pragmatic inferences of any kind. However, there remains a small class of marked (...) cases that cannot be treated as conversational implicatures, and they do require a local mode of pragmatic interpretation. (shrink)

Bare plurals (dogs) behave in ways that quantified plurals (some dogs) do not. For instance, while the sentence John owns dogs implies that John owns more than one dog, its negation John does not own dogs does not mean “John does not own more than one dog”, but rather “John does not own a dog”. A second puzzling behavior is known as the dependent plural reading; when in the scope of another plural, the ‘more than one’ meaning of the plural (...) is not distributed over, but the existential force of the plural is. For example, My friends attend good schools requires that each of my friends attend one good school, not more, while at the same time being inappropriate if all my friends attend the same school. This paper shows that both these phenomena, and others, arise from the same cause. Namely, the plural noun itself does not assert ‘more than one’, but rather the plural denotes a predicate that is number neutral (unspecified for cardinality). The ‘more than one’ meaning arises as an scalar implicature, relying on the scalar relationship between the bare plural and its singular alternative, and calculated in a sub-sentential domain; namely, before existential closure of the event variable. Finally, implications of this analysis will be discussed for the analysis of the quantified noun phrases that interact with bare plurals, such as indefinite numeral DPs (three boys), and singular universals (every boy). (shrink)

In everyday life it is often important to have a mental model of the knowledge, beliefs, desires, and intentions of other people. Sometimes it is even useful to to have a correct model of their model of our own mental states: a second-order Theory of Mind. In order to investigate to what extent adults use and acquire complex skills and strategies in the domains of Theory of Mind and the related skill of natural language use, we conducted an experiment. It (...) was based on a strategic game of imperfect information, in which it was beneficial for participants to have a good mental model of their opponent, and more specifically, to use second-order Theory of Mind. It was also beneficial for them to be aware of pragmatic inferences and of the possibility to choose between logical and pragmatic language use. We found that most participants did not seem to acquire these complex skills during the experiment when being exposed to the game for a number of different trials. Nevertheless, some participants did make use of advanced cognitive skills such as second-order Theory of Mind and appropriate choices between logical and pragmatic language use from the beginning. Thus, the results differ markedly from previous research. (shrink)

Binary judgement on under-informative utterances is the most widely used methodology to test children’s ability to generate implicatures. Accepting under-informative utterances is considered a failure to generate implicatures. We present off-line and reaction time evidence for the Pragmatic Tolerance Hypothesis, according to which some children who accept under-informative utterances are in fact competent with implicature but do not consider pragmatic violations grave enough to reject the critical utterance. Seventy-five Dutch-speaking four to nine-year-olds completed a binary and a ternary judgement task. (...) Half of the children who accepted an utterance in Experiment A penalised it in Experiment B. Reaction times revealed that these children experienced a slow-down in the critical utterances in Experiment A, suggesting that they detected the pragmatic violation even though they did not reject it. We propose that binary judgement tasks systematically underestimate children’s competence with pragmatics. (shrink)

In a series of experiments, Bott and Noveck (2004) found that the computation of scalar inferences, a variety of conversational implicature, caused a delay in response times. In order to determine what aspect of the inferential process that underlies scalar inferences caused this delay, we extended their paradigm to three other kinds of inferences: free choice inferences, conditional perfection, and exhaustivity in “it”‐clefts. In contrast to scalar inferences, the computation of these three kinds of inferences facilitated response times. Following a (...) suggestion made by Chemla and Bott (2014), we propose that the time it takes to compute a conversational implicature depends on the structural characteristics of the required alternatives. (shrink)

Next SectionIn recent years, the interpretation of scalar terms in embedded environments has been investigated extensively. Some experimentalists have been concerned with sentences like (1), in which a scalar term is embedded under a universal quantifier. The controversy involves the question whether ‘some’ in these sentences is interpreted as ‘some but not all’, thus leading to the embedded upper-bounded inference that no square is connected to all of the circles. (1) All the squares are connected with some of the circles.Geurts (...) & Pouscoulous (2009) conducted a verification task that seemed to prove that the inference is not licensed. In response, Clifton & Dube (2010) and Chemla & Spector (2011) gathered evidence suggesting the opposite conclusion. By experimentally investigating the typicality structure of complex quantified sentences like (1) above, I show how the results of the latter two experiments can be explained as typicality effects. Typicality plays a significant role in the comprehension of quantified sentences, thus complicating the interpretation of data from the kinds of experiments that have been employed to test between theories of upper-bounded inferences. (shrink)

One of the most experimentally studied scales in the literature on scalar implicatures is the quantifier scale. While the truth of some is entailed by the truth of all, some is felicitous only when all is false. This opens the possibility that some would be felicitous if, e.g., 99% of the objects in the domain of quantification fall under it, a conclusion that clashes with native speakers’ intuitions. In Experiment 1 we report a questionnaire study on the perception of quantifier (...) meanings in English, French, Slovenian and German which points to a cross-linguistic variation with respect to the perception of numerical bounds of the existential quantifier. In Experiment 2, using a picture choice task, we further examine whether the numerical bound differences correlate with differences in pragmatic interpretations of the quantifier some in English and quelques in French and interpret the results as supporting our hypothesis that some and its cross-linguistic counterparts are subjected to different processes of pragmatic enrichment. (shrink)

I investigate: to what extent do folk ascriptions of lying differ between casual and courtroom contexts? to what extent does motive to lie influence ascriptions of trust, mental states, and lying judgments? to what extent are lying judgments consistent with previous ascriptions of communicated content? Following the Supreme Court’s Bronston judgment, I expect: averaged lying judgments to be similar in casual and courtroom contexts; motive to lie to influence levels of trust, mental states ascriptions, and patterns of lying judgments; retrospective (...) judgments of lying, after being presented with the state of the world, to be inconsistent with previous judgments of communicated content: participants hold the protagonist responsible for content she did not communicate. I performed a survey experiment on the Qualtrics platform. Participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. I employed standard Likert scales and forced-choice questions. I found that: average lying judgments are similar in casual and courtroom contexts; motive to lie decreases trust ascription and increases lying judgment; judgments of lying are inconsistent with previous judgments of communicated content: participants hold the protagonist responsible for content they did not communicate. Perjury ascriptions are inconsistent. The Supreme Court’s worries expressed in the Bronston judgment are well founded. This article helps reforming jury instructions in perjury cases. (shrink)

We present evidence that preschool children oftentimes understand disjunctive sentences as if they were conjunctive. The result holds for matrix disjunctions as well as disjunctions embedded under every. At the same time, there is evidence in the literature that children understand or as inclusive disjunction in downward-entailing contexts. We propose to explain this seemingly conflicting pattern of results by assuming that the child knows the inclusive disjunction semantics of or, and that the conjunctive inference is a scalar implicature. We make (...) two assumptions about implicature computation in the child: that children access only a proper subset of the adult alternatives, and that children possess the adult capacity to strengthen sentences with implicatures. As a consequence, children are expected to sometimes not compute any implicatures at all, but in other cases they are expected to compute an implicature that is different from the adult implicature. We argue that the child’s conjunctive strengthening of disjunctive sentences realizes the latter possibility: the adult infers that the conjunction is false but the child infers that the conjunction is true. This behaviour is predicted when our assumptions about child development are coupled with the assumption that a covert exhaustive operator is responsible for strengthening in both the child and the adult. Specifically, children’s conjunctive strengthening is predicted to follow from the same mechanism used by adults to compute conjunctive free choice implicatures in response to disjunctive permission sentences. We furthermore argue that this parallel between the child and the adult extends to disambiguation preferences. In particular, we present evidence that children prefer to strengthen disjunctions to conjunctions, in matrix and embedded positions ; this result mirrors previous findings that adults prefer to compute free choice, at the root and under every. We propose a disambiguation strategy that explains the preference for conjunctive strengthening – by both the child and the adult – even though there is no general preference for exhaustification. Specifically, we propose that the preference for a conjunctive strengthening follows from a pragmatic preference for a complete answer to the Question Under Discussion. (shrink)

The computation of scalar implicatures is sometimes costly relative to basic meanings. Among the costly computations are those that involve strengthening `some' to `not all' and strengthening inclusive disjunction to exclusive disjunction. The opposite is true for some other cases of strengthening, where the strengthened meaning is less costly than its corresponding basic meaning. These include conjunctive strengthenings of disjunctive sentences (e.g., free-choice inferences) and exactly-readings of numerals. Assuming that these are indeed all instances of strengthening via implicature/exhaustification, the puzzle (...) is to explain why strengthening sometimes increases costs while at other times it decreases costs. I develop a theory of processing costs that makes no reference to the strengthening mechanism or to other aspects of the derivation of the sentence's form/meaning. Instead, costs are determined by domain-general considerations of the grammar's output, and in particular by aspects of the meanings of ambiguous sentences and particular ways they update the context. Specifically, I propose that when the hearer has to disambiguate between a sentence's basic and strengthened meaning, the processing cost of any particular choice is a function of (i) a measure of the semantic complexity of the chosen meaning and (ii) a measure of how much relevant uncertainty it leaves behind in the context. I measure semantic complexity with Boolean Complexity in the propositional case and with semantic automata in the quantificational case, both of which give a domain-general measure of the minimal representational complexity needed to express the given meaning. I measure relevant uncertainty with the information-theoretic notion of entropy; this domain-general measure formalizes how `far' the meaning is from giving a complete answer to the question under discussion, and hence gives an indication of how much representational complexity is yet to come. Processing costs thus follow from domain-general considerations of current and anticipated representational complexity. The results might also speak to functional motivations for having strengthening mechanisms in the first place. Specifically, exhaustification allows language users to use simpler forms than would be available without it to both resolve relevant uncertainties and convey complex meanings. (shrink)

This study investigated the understanding of underinformative sentences like “Some elephants have trunks” by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The scalar term ‘some’ can be interpreted pragmatically, ‘Not all elephants have trunks’, or logically, ‘Some and possibly all elephants have trunks’. Literature indicates that adults with ASD show no real difficulty in interpreting scalar implicatures, i.e., they often interpret them pragmatically, as controls do. This contrasts with the traditional claim of difficulties of people with ASD in other pragmatic domains, (...) and is more in line with the idea that pragmatic problems are not universal. The aim of this study was to: a) gain insight in the ability of children with ASD to derive scalar implicatures, and b) do this by assessing not only sensitivity to underinformativeness, but also different degrees of tolerance to violations of informativeness. We employed a classic statement-evaluation task, presenting optimal, logical false, and underinformative utterances. In Experiment 1, children had to express their judgment on a binary option ‘I agree’ vs ‘I disagree’. In Experiment 2, a ternary middle answer option ‘I agree a bit’ was also available. Sixty-six Flemish-speaking 10-year-old children were tested: 22 children with ASD, an IQ-matched group, and an age-matched group. In the binary judgment task, the ASD-group gave more pragmatic answers than the other groups, which was significant in the mixed effects logistic regression analysis, although not in the non-parametric analysis. In the ternary judgment task, the children with ASD showed a dichotomized attitude towards the speaker’s meaning, by tending to either fully agree or fully disagree with underinformative statements, in contrast with TD children, who preferred the middle option. Remarkably, the IQ-matched group exhibited the same pattern of results as the ASD group. Thanks to a fine-grained measure such as the ternary judgment task, this study highlighted a neglected aspect of the pragmatic profile of ASD, whose struggle with social communication seems to affect also the domain of informativeness. We discuss the implications of the dichotomized reaction towards violations of informativeness of these two groups in terms of the potential role of ASD and of cognitive and verbal abilities. (shrink)

A number of studies have demonstrated pragmatic language difficulties in people with Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders. However, research about how people with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders understand scalar implicatures is surprisingly rare, since SIs have generated much of the most recent literature. Scalar implicatures are pragmatic inferences, based on linguistic expressions like some, must, or, which are part of a scale of informativeness. Logically, the less informative expressions imply the more informative ones, but pragmatically people usually (...) infer that the presence of a less informative term implies that the more informative term was not applicable. In one of the few existing studies with people with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders, Wampers et al. observed that in general, people with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders were less likely to derive SIs than controls. The current study has three main aims. First, we want to replicate the original finding with the scalar terms some-all. Second, we want to investigate how these patients deal with different scalar terms, that is, we want to investigate if scalar diversity is also observed in this clinical group. Third, we investigate the role of working memory, often seen as another important mechanism to enable inferring SIs. Twenty-one individuals with a psychotic disorder and 21 matched controls answered 54 under-informative statements, in which seven different pairs of scalar terms were used. In addition, working memory capacity was measured. Patients with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders did not make more logical interpretations when processing quantifiers, disconfirming Wampers et al.. However, certain scalar scales elicited more pragmatic interpretations than others, which is in line with the scalar diversity hypothesis. Additionally, we observed only partial evidence for the role of working memory. Only for the scalar scale and-or, a significant effect of working memory was observed. The implications of these results for patients with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders are discussed, but also the role of working memory for pragmatic inferences, as well as the place of SIs in experimental pragmatics. (shrink)

Next SectionDiscourse particles typically express the attitudes of interlocutors with respect to the propositional content of an utterance – for example, marking whether or not a speaker believes the content of the proposition that she uttered. In German, the particle doch – which has no direct English translation – is commonly used to correct a belief that is thought to be common ground among those present. We asked whether German adults and 5-year-olds are able to infer that a speaker who (...) utters doch intends to be understood in this way. Sixty-four children (4;9–5;3 years) and twenty-four adults participated in a comprehension task in which a speaker explicitly expressed either a positive belief or a negative belief. Subsequently, in both conditions, the speaker checked the truth of her previous belief and corrected her belief with doch. In both the group of adults and the group of children, polarity of the speaker’s belief affected hearers’ interpretations of the speaker’s utterance. In a third condition we investigated whether participants could also perform the more difficult task of interpreting the speaker’s utterance with doch while inferring the speaker’s belief. Whereas adults showed a similar performance as in the explicit belief conditions, children showed limited abilities in keeping track of the speaker’s belief. (shrink)

Experimental investigations into children’s interpretation of scalar terms show that children have difficulties with scalar implicatures in tasks. In contrast with adults, they are for instance not able deriving the pragmatic interpretation that “some” means “not all” (Noveck, 2001; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003). However, there is also substantial experimental evidence that children are not incapable of drawing scalar inferences and that they are aware of the pragmatic potential of scalar expressions. In these kinds of studies, the prime interest is to (...) discover what conditions facilitate implicature production for children. One of the factors that seem to be difficult for children is the generation of the scalar alternative. In a Felicity Judgment Task (FJT) the alternative is given. Participants are presented with a pair of utterances and were asked to choose the most felicitous description. In such a task, even five-year-old children showed a very good performance (Chierchia et al., 2001; Foppolo, Guasti, & Chierchia, 2012). Our study wants to build on this tradition, by using a FJT where not only “some-all” choices are given, but also “some-many” and “many-all”. We compared performance of 59 five-year-old children with 34 11-year-old children. The results indicated that performance of both age-groups was clearly above chance. With respect to the ‘some-all’ choice, we find in both age-groups very high accuracy, replicating Foppolo et al. (2012). However, for the five-year-old children, the critical and ambiguous items were more difficult than the control items and they also performed worse on these two items than the eleven-year-old children. Interestingly with respect to the issue of scalar diversity, the eleven-year-old children were also presented temporal items, which turned out to be more difficult than the quantitative ones. (shrink)

We evaluate the richness of the child’s input in semantics and its relation to the hypothesis space available to the child. Our case study is the acquisition of the universal quantifier every. We report two main findings regarding the acquisition of every on the basis of a corpus study of child-directed and child-ambient speech. Our first finding is that the input in semantics is rich enough to systematically eliminate instances of the subset problem of language acquisition: overly general hypotheses about (...) the meaning of every can violate pragmatic constraints, making such hypotheses incompatible with the child’s input. Our second finding is that the semantic input is too poor to eliminate instances of what we refer to as the superset problem, the mirror image of the subset problem. We argue that at least some overly specific hypotheses about the meaning of every are compatible with the child’s input, suggesting either that those hypotheses are not made available by UG or that non-trivial inductive biases are involved in children’s acquisition of every. (shrink)