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Pragmatic tolerance: Implications for the acquisition of informativeness and implicature
- Source :
- Cognition
- Publisher :
- Elsevier B.V.
-
Abstract
- Recent investigations of the acquisition of scalar implicature report that young children do not reliably reject a sentence with a weak scalar term, e.g. ‘some of the books are red’, when it is used as a description of a situation where a stronger statement is true, e.g. where all the books are red. This is taken as evidence that children do not interpret the sentence with the implicature that the stronger statement does not hold. We propose that (a) these tasks cannot differentiate between actual implicature derivation and mere sensitivity to violations of informativeness; and that (b) children’s apparent failure is not due to lack of competence (whether with informativeness or implicature) but due to their tolerance of pragmatic violations. We report three studies with 5-to-6-year-old English-speaking children and adults employing utterances involving scalar and non-scalar expressions. These show that both age-groups are competent with informativeness, but also tolerant of pragmatic infelicity. These findings have implications for the well-established literature on whether children are aware of ambiguity in referential communication tasks.
- Subjects :
- Adult
Linguistics and Language
Ambiguity
Logic
Cognitive Neuroscience
media_common.quotation_subject
Concept Formation
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Interpersonal communication
Scalar implicature
050105 experimental psychology
Language and Linguistics
Article
Judgment
Young Adult
Developmental and Educational Psychology
Humans
0501 psychology and cognitive sciences
Child
media_common
Language
Implicature
060201 languages & linguistics
Pragmatics
Informativeness
05 social sciences
06 humanities and the arts
Language acquisition
Linguistics
Comprehension
Acquisition
Child, Preschool
0602 languages and literature
Psychology
Sentence
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 00100277
- Issue :
- 1
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Cognition
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....2cca4600cf5baaad8a52e504c976f8f3
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2011.02.015