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Young children excel at pragmatic inferences known as ad hoc quantity implicatures: they can infer, for example, that a speaker who said “the card with apples” meant the card with nothing but apples. However, it is not known whether children take into account the speaker’s perspective in deriving such inferences, as adults are able to do, and as the received theories of pragmatics claim. In two experiments, we tested children (5-7 years, N = 33 and N = 25) and adults using a picture-matching director task, in which participants played a game giving cards to the speaker, with some cards being in common ground and some in privileged ground. We found that adults can both derive implicatures when all information is in common ground and not derive them when relevant information is in privileged ground. Children also derive ad hoc implicatures when relevant information is in common ground but, crucially, fail to not derive them when it is in privileged ground. Children’s difficulty to integrate perspective-taking with pragmatic inferencing challenges the received theories about the necessity of perspective-taking in pragmatics.

Copyright © 2019 ISCA This paper presents a tablet-based app for Speech and Language Assessment in Schools and Homes (Splash) to provide a first screening for young children aged 4-6 years to assess their speech and language skills. The app aims to be easy-to-administer with an adult, such as a teacher or parent, directing the child through the tasks. Three fun games have been developed to assess receptive language, expressive language and connected speech, respectively. Currently in proof-of-concept mode, when complete Splash will use automatic spoken language processing to give an instant estimate of a child's communication ability and provide guidance on whether to speak specialist support. While not a diagnostic tool, the aim is for Splash to be used to provide immediate reassurance or direction to concerned parents, guardians or teachers as it can be administered by anyone, anywhere.

The few reports on the language skills of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) offer conflicting evidence on whether they face significant challenges, and if so, whether these challenges are present in all aspects of language. Here, we investigated a sample of Greek-speaking children with ADHD ( n = 29) using a structural language (vocabulary, grammar) and a pragmatic language assessment. To ascertain the extent of strengths and weaknesses, we compared the performance of children with ADHD to typically developing (TD) peers ( n = 29) and also to children with developmental language disorder (DLD; n = 25), who face challenges particularly in structural language. As regards structural language, ADHD children performed significantly lower than their TD peers but significantly higher than the DLD group. In pragmatics, ADHD children performed numerically lower than any other group, but differences did not reach statistical significance. Children with ADHD face difficulties with language skills and especially with structural language. Sophisticated linguistic assessment is crucial, as it facilitates the identification of children with different challenges by measuring performances on distinct components. Language difficulties in ADHD should not be overlooked but must be evaluated thoroughly for more effective intervention planning.

Grammatical theories of event structure have broadly proposed that event representations are decomposed and articulated in a variety of different constituents across a sentence. These theories raise questions for sentence comprehension: how are cues to these disparate components recognized and put back together to construct a complete and coherent representation of the event under discussion? Such questions are made all the more complex during real-time processing as these components arrive one after another in quick succession, and yet studies show that speakers are highly sensitive to these cues and use them to guide interpretation in a rapid and highly incremental fashion. The chapter examines studies from the psycholinguistic literature with a focus on three aspects of event structure: manner and result verbal meanings, temporal boundaries of events, and the encoding of event participants.

Language and communication skills are essential aspects of child development, which are often disrupted in children with neurodevelopmental disorders. Cutting edge research in psycholinguistics suggests that multilingualism has potential to influence social, linguistic and cognitive development. Thus, multilingualism has implications for clinical assessment, diagnostic formulation, intervention and support offered to families. We present a systematic review and synthesis of the effects of multilingualism for children with neurodevelopmental disorders and discuss clinical implications. Methods We conducted systematic searches for studies on multilingualism in neurodevelopmental disorders. Keywords for neurodevelopmental disorders were based on Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition categories as follows; Intellectual Disabilities, Communication Disorders, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Attention‐Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Specific Learning Disorder, Motor Disorders, Other Neurodevelopmental Disorders. We included only studies based on empirical research and published in peer‐reviewed journals. Results Fifty studies met inclusion criteria. Thirty‐nine studies explored multilingualism in Communication Disorders, 10 in ASD and two in Intellectual Disability. No studies on multilingualism in Specific Learning Disorder or Motor Disorders were identified. Studies which found a disadvantage for multilingual children with neurodevelopmental disorders were rare, and there appears little reason to assume that multilingualism has negative effects on various aspects of functioning across a range of conditions. In fact, when considering only those studies which have compared a multilingual group with developmental disorders to a monolingual group with similar disorders, the findings consistently show no adverse effects on language development or other aspects of functioning. In the case of ASD, a positive effect on communication and social functioning has been observed. Conclusions There is little evidence to support the widely held view that multilingual exposure is detrimental to the linguistic or social development of individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders. However, we also note that the available pool of studies is small and the number of methodologically high quality studies is relatively low. We discuss implications of multilingualism for clinical management of neurodevelopmental disorders, and discuss possible directions for future research., UK Arts & Humanities Research Council. Grant Number: AH/N004671/1

Generic generalisations (e.g. ‘tigers have stripes’, ‘ducks lay eggs’) refer to a characteristic property of a kind. Recently, the generics-as-default view has posited that we have a bias towards interpreting universally quantified statements as generic. Evidence offered for this view is the Generic Overgeneralisation (GOG) effect, which refers to the documented tendency of participants to misinterpret a quantificational statement like ‘all ducks lay eggs’ as if it were a generic and thus accept it as true, even though they know it is false. Across two experiments in English and Greek we systematically addressed the relevance of context and quantifier domain restriction for this kind of behaviour. Participants judged generic majority characteristic statements like ‘tigers have stripes’ or statements with universal quantifiers with different sensitivity to quantifier domain restriction preceded by one of three levels of context (neutral, contradictory and supportive). We found that context significantly affected the rates at which participants accepted universally quantified statements. Our results demonstrate that quantifier domain restriction is a viable alternative explanation for a significant proportion of the judgements of universally quantified statements that have been called GOG errors.

Binary judgement on under-informative utterances (e.g. Some horses jumped over the fence, when all horses did) 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 (Experiment A) and a ternary judgement task (Experiment B). 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.