3-194 - Pragmatic implicature as social inference: Evidence from language and action

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Children's ability to make pragmatic inferences has been studied in largely separate literatures: linguistic implicature and social cognition. This symposium provides a unifying perspective on classical and recent findings in these two literatures, suggesting that the development of pragmatic competence - whether expressed as interpretation of linguistic utterances or evaluation of goal-directed actions - reflects a sophisticated understanding of relevant alternatives.

Paper 1 examines how non-linguistic alternatives can affect logical inference using the Piagetian class inclusion task. Children reasoned about the alternative states of the world to evaluate not only the felicity but also the truth of linguistic utterances. Paper 2 shows that 4- and 5-year-olds’ successful evaluation of under-informative pedagogical demonstration depends on whether they had seen a fully informative demonstration, revealing their difficulty with spontaneously generating alternative demonstrations the teacher could have provided given his epistemic state. Paper 3 further examines the role of social inference in pragmatic implicature tasks, showing that 4-year-olds have difficulty incorporating a speaker’s epistemic states to evaluate the informativeness of linguistic utterances. Finally, our discussant will synthesize these findings by highlighting (a)the parallels between the pragmatics of linguistic communication and the pragmatics of goal-directed actions, and (b)the ways in which these results could lead to a unified account of pragmatic implicatures as social inferences in communicative contexts.

Collectively, our papers and discussions will cast a novel perspective on the development of pragmatic inferences, suggesting a common underlying mechanism for understanding what others mean, given what others know and what else could be true.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

• Hyowon Gweon, Stanford University

Discussant

• Dare Baldwin, University of Oregon

Individual Presentations

• Alternatives in reasoning: Bridging logical and pragmatic inference - Presenting Author: Dimitrios Skordos, UC San Diego; Allyson Myers, San Diego State University; David Barner, University of California San Diego

• Order matters: Limitations in children's evaluation of under-informative teachers. - Presenting Author: Hyowon Gweon, Stanford University; Mika Asaba, Stanford University

• Pragmatic inferences and speaker knowledge - Presenting Author: Anna Papafragou, University of Delaware; Carlyn Friedberg, University of Delaware; Matthew Cohen, University of Delaware