Abstract

In this article we present two sets of experiments designed to investigate the acquisition of scalar implicatures. Scalar implicatures arise in examples like Some profissors are famous where the speaker's use of some typically indicates that s/he had reasons not to use a more informative term, e.g. all. Someprofissors are famous therefore gives rise to the implicature that not all professors are famous. Recent studies on the development of pragmatics suggest that preschool children are often insensitive to such implicatures when they interpret scalar terms (Noveck 2001 for terms like might and some; Chierchia, Crain, Guasti, Gualmini and Meroni 2001 for or). This conclusion raises two important questions: a) are all scalar terms treated in the same way by young children?, and b) does the child's difficulty reflect a genuine inability to derive scalar implicatures or is it due to demands imposed by the experimental task on an otherwise pragmatically savvy child? Experiment 1 addresses the first question by testing a group of 30 5-year-olds and 30 adults (all native speakers of Greek) on three different scales, meriki/ oli (some/all), dio/ tris (two/three) and arxi<o / teliono (start/finish). In each case, subjects were presented with contexts which satisfy the truth conditions of the stronger (i.e. more informative) terms on each scale (i.e. all, three and finish) but were described using the weaker terms of the scales (i.e. some, two, start). We found that while adults overwhelmingly rejected these infelicitous descriptions, children almost never did so. Children also differed from adults in that thei rejection rate on the numerical scale was reliably higher than on the two other scales. In order to address question (b), we trained a group of 30 5-year-olds to detect in...

Citations