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Recent work has demonstrated that children are able to use alternatives to derive pragmatic inferences. This work aims to extend those findings and update the previous registration submitted with methodological updates following a pilot study. The present project investigates how children make use of alternatives to derive quantity inferences. Recent developments in priming have suggested that pragmatic representations are involved in inferencing and these representations include alternatives. Building on the current work on pragmatic priming, three priming experiments are proposed to test whether children’s improvement in inferencing is related to pragmatic representations. It has been established that pragmatic priming is observed in 5 year olds with quantifiers and ad-hoc expresssions. Here I outline two experiments to extend this, first using numerical expressions and then looking at cross expression priming between numbers and quantifiers (as shown in Bott & Chemla, 2016).

We learn about the world through language. Communication is an inherently complicated process. On the surface it seems simple enough to take the sounds we hear and map those onto words and then onto meaning. However, listeners often go beyond the surface form of an utterance and compute additional meaning (Grice, 1975). That is, they compute pragmatic inferences. For example, if I say in conversation that there is a “yellow banana” this would give rise to the inference that there is another non-yellow banana present (Sedivy, 2003). Since the colour of a banana is typically rather mundane, as listeners we intuit why the speaker has chosen to specify the colour. Pragmatic inferences rely on the expectation that interlocutors communicate rationally and cooperatively. We have an expectation for conversational contributions to add something to the discourse (Rohde, Futrell, & Lucas, 2021). In the studies registered here we examine inferences that arise from mundane content at the propositional level. For example, if a speaker proffers a mundane utterance like “I saw that the library walls are blue” when talking about a location they are familiar with, a listener is licensed to look for a communicative reason for such a mundane contribution to the conversation (see Kravtchenko & Demberg 2015). Study 1 will examine how speaker characteristics influence the inferences drawn by listeners. Study 2 will examine how highlighting the speaker's intention to be communicative influences the inferences drawn by listeners.

Investigating the links between nature connectedness, positive affect, and wellbeing

There is a debate about the exactness of children’s number representations. Some argue that numbers are lexically exact whereas others suggest the exact interpretation of a number arises through pragmatic inferencing. Work in adults suggests common processes involved in exact number interpretations and scalar implicatures. The present study tests if children’s interpretations of numbers is malleable. This is an updated registration following piloting this experiment https://osf.io/ap6vj. This registration details the addition of a baseline phase.

This is a pre-registration for the second study of a project looking at expectations for informativity in language processing. Comprehenders rely on real-world knowledge when guessing upcoming content. For example, taking a sip from the waterfall is more expected than taking a sip from the transmitter (Kutas & Hillyard 1980). By contrast, speakers tend to omit typical content in favour of newsworthy content: they include an optional instrument more often when it is atypical, favouring the production of stab with an ice pick over stab with a knife (Brown & Dell 1987). These findings are taken to reflect constraints on cooperative communication whereby speakers’ contributions are expected to be appropriately informative and relevant (Grice 1975). If comprehenders are rational and are sensitive to speakers’ production preferences, these should also bear upon their predictions about upcoming content: that is, they should expect the kind of content that cooperative speakers are likely to mention, rather than just the kind of content that is likely to be the case in the real world. In our first study in this project (Experiment 1), we elicited sentence completions via a Cloze task as an index of comprehenders’ expectations about upcoming material (Taylor 1953). We manipulated the salience of the speaker and showed that the more aware participants are of the speaker as an intentional communicator, the more informative they expect the speaker’s contribution to be. In this second study, we will investigate whether this expectation for informativity is further malleable depending on properties of the speaker (Grodner & Sedivy 2011). Specifically, we ask whether participants will adjust their expectations based on the speaking style of two different speakers: one speaker routinely makes uninformative utterances, and one produces utterances that are highly informative.