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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.

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.

This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition ofthird-person pronominal objects in 5-year-olds for 16 languages. This methodology allows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languagesthat lack object clitics (“pronoun languages”) with languages that employclitics in the relevant context (“clitic languages”), thus establishing a robustcross-linguistic baseline in the domain of clitic and pronoun production for5-year-olds. High rates of pronominal production are found in our results,indicating that children have the relevant pragmatic knowledge required toselect a pronominal in the discourse setting involved in the experiment aswell as the relevant morphosyntactic knowledge involved in the productionof pronominals. It is legitimate to conclude from our data that a child whoat age 5 is not able to produce any or few pronominals is a child at risk forlanguage impairment. In this way, pronominal production can be taken as adevelopmental marker, provided that one takes into account certain crosslinguistic differences discussed in the article.