Sentence Evaluation Task (SET): SOME ELEPHANTS HAVE TRUNKS

Do you agree?

CONCLUSIONS so far:

CRITICAL AGE FOR EMERGENCE OF SI:

at 6 children are like adults, deriving SI “not all”;

at 5 only half of the children are adult-like

TASK INFLUENCES SUBJECTS’ ANSWERS:

more “logic” responses in children and adults if non natural setting

BIMODAL DISTRIBUTION OF SUBJECTS:

subjects are consistent in their answers

CHILDREN PERFORMANCE DEPENDS ON SCALE:

SI related to discrete scales emerge earlier

0

0

5

SET: DISTRIBUTION OF CHILDREN AFTER TRAINING

NUMBER OF TIMES CRITICAL STATEMENTS WERE ACCEPTED

10

15

SUBJECTS

0 1 2 3 4 5

Fig. 3

SCALAR IMPLICATURES IN CHILDREN: FAILURES OR SKILLFUL STRATEGIES?

Francesca Foppolo & Maria Teresa Guasti - University of Milano-Bicocca

For correspondance: francesca.foppolo@unimib.it

What is said [literal meaning]: SOME (= at least one), TWO (= at least two)

What could have been said instead [alternatives] : ALL, THREE

Scales: <some, all>; < n, (n+1)>, <, > where is informationally stronger than

Make your contribution as informative as it’s required (Maxim of Quantity)

What is conveyed [scalar implicature] : NOT ALL, NOT THREE

A: Some linguists work in MilanB: Where do the other linguists work?

some but not all linguists work in MilanC: Lyn has 2 childrenD: I think she wants a third

Lyn has exactly 2 children

MECHANISM OF SI COMPUTATION (Chierchia, 2002)

SIs are part of the recursive interpretation of a sentenceFor any expression with a scalar item, the strengthened interpretation is computed by adding an implicature(=negation of stronger alternatives) to its plain valuePlain/scalar value are comparedSI is adopted, only if it leads to a more informative statement

SCALAR IMPLICATURES (SI): examples & derivation

DISTRIBUTION OF CHILDREN

1 3 4 5 0 1 2 3 4 5

SUBJECTS

SET: DISTRIBUTION OF 7 YEAR-OLD-CHILDREN BEFORE TRAINING15

10

5

0 NUMBER OF TIMES CRITICAL STATEMENTS WERE ACCEPTED

Fig.2

Making the experimental goals clear

Training: A friend of mine calls this

AN ANIMAL

BUT... there is a better way to describe it:

THIS IS A PIG.

RESULTS 1 (SET)

CHILDREN (7 YEARS OLD) ARE MORE LOGICAL THAN ADULTS (Some = some even all)

TRAINING HAS AN EFFECT: CHILDREN BECOME LIKE ADULTS

ADULTS’ DERIVATION OF SI: 50%

Results: compare Fig.3 with Fig. 1&2EXPERIMENT 1 - Guasti et al. (2004): Replication of Noveck (2001)

5 year old children – 3 scales: <some, all>, <two, three>, <start, finish>Derivation of SI by children:DISCRETE SCALE (65%) LOGIC SCALE (12,5%)ASPECTUAL SCALE (10%)

Interestingly, subjects held abimodal distribution:6/10 always rejected the critical statements3/10 always accepted them(1/10 behave at chance)

SCALE matters

Papafragou & Musolino (2004) – testing different scales

Critical trial: an example

Exp: What’s happening in the story? Puppet: SOME OF THE SMURFS ARE GOING ON A BOAT

NUMBER OF TIMES CRITICAL STATEMENTS WERE ACCEPTED

TVJT: DISTRIBUTION OF SUBJECTS AS A FUNCTION OF AGE and YES RESPONSES

Did the puppet say it WELL?RESULTS 2 (TVJT)

CHILDREN AT 6 & 7 DERIVE SI AS MUCH AS ADULTS:

interestingly, adults’ & 7 year olds’ performance improved in this task: 9/19 adults & 16/18 children interpreted “some” logically in

SET, while only 1/12 adults and 2/15 did so in TVJT

ONLY 50% OF THE CHILDREN AT 4 & 5 DERIVE SI:

interestingly, they don’t behave at chance: half consistently accept, and half consistently reject the critical statements

AGE & TASK affect subjects’ performance

EXPERIMENT 2 – Developmental study using the Truth Value Judgment Task

Subjects N. Age15 712 612 512 412 Adults

Material 5 critical stories

6 story-fillers

Procedure Truth Value Judgement Task

DO CHILDREN DERIVE SCALAR

IMPLICATURES?

SET: DISTRIBUTION OF ADULTS (no training)15

10

5

0

0 1 2 3 4 5

NUMBER OF TIMES CRITICAL STATEMENTS WERE ACCEPTED

Fig.1

SUBJECTS

TURN PAGE

NELS 35

PRAGMATIC FAILURES

OR RESPONSE

STRATEGIES?

SET: DISTRIBUTION ADULTS(NO TRAINING)

Which features of the experimental design adopted in all the experiments so far could have encouraged the use of a strategy in responding? different groups of subjects were tested on different scales separately, so that each subject was tested on the same kind of statement 4 times in the course of the experiment (in P&M)

the critical stories had all the same underlying structure and the same outcome (some children remarked this similarity across stories, despite the presence of the fillers in between)

this fact could contribute to make the whole situation “artificial”, putting pragmatic norm aside

Significant effect of AGE (F(1, 78) =28.85, p<.0001) & ITEM (F(3, 234)=5.54, p<.001) and interaction among these factors (F(3, 234)=6.89, p<.0001)Children derivation of SI: two=97,5% significantly higher than other items: a piece of = 62,5% (p=.0003) some (subj.) = 70% (p=.006); some (obj.) = 75% (p=.03) (difference between some subj./obj. position: n.s.)Children performance on control items: above 92% for all the items except a piece of (p<.006): 80% correct

Derivation of SI

30

39

2825

40393940

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

1 2 3 4

Scalar items

Num

. of s

ubj.

that

der

ive S

I

Children

Adults

A piece of

Some (subj) Some (obj)Two

INTERESTINGLY: Subjects do not split in 2 groups anymore:

not necessarily the answer given to the 1st scalar item is reiterated for the others

5 year-olds performance with SI improve a lot in this experiment, compared to the

results obtained by P&M with the same task (but different design):

65% vs 97,5% for TWO;

12% vs 72,5 % for SOME

FINAL DISCUSSION Individual variability across items indicate that subjects were answering according to the item, as they normally do in conversations, and not resorting to a strategy The emergence of the ability in deriving SI is linked to the scalar item involved: different scales may be lexicalised at different stages in developmentHigh performance on controls indicate that children know the scalar items: this is not enough for SIYounger children are more sensible to the “anomalies” of the experimental setting and less ready to detect the “rules” of the game

RESULTS

Subjects n. 40 5-year-old children (Age range: 4,11-5,11; Mean Age: 5,4; SD: ,15) n. 40 Adults control

Materials 16 critical trials = underinformative statements containing different scalar items (in contexts that verify “three”, “all”, “whole” respectively):4 items with TWO – like Two Smurfs went on a boat 8 items with SOME OF - 4 items like Some of the clowns went fishing

4 items like The dwarf picked up some of the carrots4 items with A PIECE OF – like Cinderella decorated a piece of the tree32 control trials - to check the understanding of the scalar items involved in the inference

Procedure TVJT4 conditions were created, 12 statements each: 8 control + 4 critical

statements, one for scale 10 subjects were randomly assigned to each condition so that each subject was shown only one occurrence of each target itemto avoid a parallelism across stories, the structure of the stories used to test different scales varied a lot, and the same initial structure was used to test

different statements (with different outcomes)

1 characters+ 3/5 objects

5 characters+ 2 alternatives

this allowed a greater variability of the material presented to each subject and a comparison of performance across different scalar items WITHIN the same subject

The dwarf picked up SOME OF the carrotsUnderinformative

Batman boughtSOME OF the pearsTrue

Baloo closed TWO binsTrue

The owl lighted up TWO candlesFalse

ALL the soldiers rode a horseFalse

TWO clowns went fishingUnderinformative

SOME OF the Smurfs went by boatUnderinformative

ALL the monkeys had a biscuitTrue

A different experimental design: BLOCKING STRATEGIES

ReferencesBrain, M. and B. Roumain (1981). Children’s comprehension of “or”: Evidence for a sequence of competencies. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 31:46-70.Chierchia, G., S. Crain, M. T. Guasti, A. Gualmini and L. Meroni (2001). The Acquisition of Disjunction: Evidence for a Grammatical View of Scalar Implicatures. In Proceedings of the 25th Boston University Conference on Language Development. Sommerville, Cascadilla Press.Chierchia, G. (2002) Scalar Implicatures, Polarity Phenomena, and the Syntax/Pragmatics Interface. Manuscript, University of Milan-BicoccaChierchia, G., M. T. Guasti, A. Gualmini, L. Meroni, S. Crain, F. Foppolo (2004). Semantic and pragmatic competence in children and adults’ comprehension of “or”. In Experimental Pragmatics, eds I.Noveck and D. Sperber, Palgrave.Crain, S. and R. Thornton (1998). Investigations in Universal Grammar. A Guide to Experiments on the Acquisition of Syntax and Semantics. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.808Foppolo F., Guasti M. T., Chierchia G. (2004) Pragmatic inferences in children’s comprehension of scalar items. Talk presented at Second Lisbon Meeting on Language Acquisition Lisboa, 1-4 June 2004Grice, P. (1975). Logic and Conversation. In P. Cole and J. Morgan (eds.) Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. Academic Press, New York. Grice, P. (1989) Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.Guasti M. T., Foppolo F., Chierchia G. (2004) (in prep.) Scalar Implicatures in Child Language: failures or skilful strategies? Guasti M. T., Chierchia G., Foppolo F., Gualmini A., Meroni L.(2004) Why Children and Adults Sometimes (but not always) Compute Implicatures.To appear in Language and Cognitive ProcessesGuasti M. T. (2002) Language Acquisition. The Growth of Grammar. MIT Press. Cambridge, MA.Hirschberg, J. (1985). A Theory of Scalar Implicatures. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.Horn, L. (1972). On the Semantic Properties of Logical Operators in English. Doctoral Dissertation, UCLA, CA. Levinson, S. (2000) Presumptive meaning. Cambridge, MA :MIT Press.Noveck, I. (2001). When children are more logical than adults: Experimental investigations of scalar implicatures. Cognition, 78, 165-188.Papafragou A. and J. Musolino (2003) Scalar Implicatures at the Semantic-Pragmatics Interface. Cognition, 80, 253-282.Smith C. L. (1980) Quantifier and question answering in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 30:191-205.e-mail: francesca.foppolo@unimib.itNELS 35 - Storrs, Oct 22-24 2004