2-121 - Mechanisms of pragmatic development in language comprehension

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Successful communication requires pragmatic understanding: going beyond what is said to make inferences about speakers’ intended meanings. A popular case study of pragmatic development is implicature, in which weak descriptions imply that stronger alternatives are not true (e.g., “I ate some of the cookies”->”I didn’t eat all”). This symposium reports new data that further our understanding of the complex pattern of findings on children’s ability to make scalar, ad-hoc, and ignorance implicatures.

Using eye-tracking, Paper 1 finds that older preschoolers can make ad-hoc implicatures, but younger children struggle, likely due to the inhibitory demands of the task. Paper 2 reports a direct comparison between scalar and ad-hoc implicatures, suggesting that failure in scalar implicature is a stable individual difference that is unconnected to pragmatic competence more broadly. Paper 3 finds that exposure to both the stronger lexical alternative (“all”) and also the weaker alternative (“none”) can improve children’s SI computation for “some”. Paper 4 examines implicature comprehension in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a population typically impaired in pragmatic reasoning, and finds that they are capable of performing some epistemic reasoning in ignorance implicature, but that their scalar implicatures do not depend on speakers’ knowledge state.

Together these studies deepen our understanding of pragmatic development and suggest that implicatures proceed from an early-developing understanding of informativeness and contrast. Nevertheless, scalar implicatures in particular depend on substantial linguistic competence, and may become increasingly automatic and less dependent on these pragmatic building blocks.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chairs

• Alexandra Horowitz, Stanford University

• Erica Jiye Yoon, Stanford Univ

Individual Presentations

• Children’s on-line processing of ad-hoc implicatures - Presenting Author: Erica Jiye Yoon, Stanford Univ; Michael C. Frank, Stanford University

• Computing scalar implicatures relates to comprehension of scale-mates rather than general sensitivity to informativeness - Presenting Author: Alexandra Horowitz, Stanford University; Michael C. Frank, Stanford University

• Pragmatic inference in children: reasoning about scalar alternatives - Presenting Author: Dimitrios Skordos, College of William and Mary; Anna Papafragou, Univ of Delaware

• Gricean epistemic reasoning in Autism Spectrum Disorders - Presenting Author: Lara Klainerman Hochstein, University of California, San Diego; David A Barner, University of California, San Diego