ERIC Number: EJ1284687
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2021-Mar
Pages: 23
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
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Scalar and Ad-Hoc Pragmatic Inferences in Children: Guess Which One Is Easier
Foppolo, Francesca; Mazzaggio, Greta; Panzeri, Francesca; Surian, Luca
Journal of Child Language, v48 n2 p350-372 Mar 2021
Several studies investigated preschoolers' ability to compute scalar and ad-hoc implicatures, but only one compared children's performance with both kinds of implicature with the same task, a picture selection task. In Experiment 1 (N = 58, age: 4;2-6;0), we first show that the truth value judgment task, traditionally employed to investigate children's pragmatic ability, prompts a rate of pragmatic responses comparable to the picture selection task. In Experiment 2 (N = 141, age: 3;8-9;2) we used the picture selection task to compare scalar and ad-hoc implicatures and linked the ability to derive these implicatures to some cognitive and linguistic measures. We found that four- and five-year-olds children performed better on ad-hoc than on scalar implicatures. Furthermore, we found that morphosyntactic competence was associated with success in both kinds of implicatures, while performance on mental state reasoning was positively associated with success on scalar but not ad-hoc implicatures.
Descriptors: Preschool Children, Pragmatics, Inferences, Task Analysis, Pictorial Stimuli, Value Judgment, Language Acquisition, Responses, Cognitive Ability, Morphology (Languages), Syntax, Correlation, Comparative Analysis
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
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Language: English
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