2018 Friday Poster 6728b

Friday, November 2, 2018 | Poster Session I, Metcalf Small | 3pm

Present to the eye, away from the mind. Dissociating online comprehension and offline judgments of indirect scalar inferences
D. Panizza, M. Thalmann

Indirect scalar inferences (ISI) are generated by negating universally quantified statements (e.g. ‘not all boys left’ -> ‘some boys left’). Experimental works investigating ISIs with judgment tasks [1,2] revealed that children accepted violations of ISIs more often than adults. A recent eye-tracking study [3] reported that ISIs improved comprehension of complex sentences involving subject- universal quantifier and negation in 4- to 5-year-old children (pragmatic boost).

The aim of the present study is to investigate comprehension of sentences involving negation and universally quantified objects in children and adults. In particular, we explored whether children tolerate violations of ISIs more often and whether ISIs improve their comprehension of (1).

We employed a semantic decision task (see [3]) between two scenarios with eye movement recording. The experimental sentences were of the form in (1), prerecorded and presented with unbiased intonation.

(1) Der Kapitän hat nicht mit allen Meerjungfrauen getanzt.

The captain has  not   with all  mermaids           danced

35 German-speaking preschoolers (age=58.9m), 48 elementary school children (age=104.3m) and 48 adult controls were presented with 16 stories involving two groups of pirates, acted out with toys or shown on a computer screen.

Each group showcased one of the three scenarios in Fig. 1: a FALSE scenario where the captain was dancing with all the mermaids, a NALL scenario where the captain danced with not all but some of the mermaids (support for the ISI) and a NONE scenario where he did not dance with any mermaid (ISI violation). The task was to reward the group which best followed the instructions in the test sentence, or reject both.

The offline judgments (Fig. 2) show that preschoolers systematically chose the FALSE scenario, hence ignoring negation in (1). Instead, the other groups consistently chose both NALL and NONE scenarios over the FALSE one. Condition 3, attesting participants’ preference, shows that the preference for the NALL scenario over the NONE constantly decreases with age (adults: 77%; 9yo: 68%; 6yo: 55%), indexing higher acceptance of ISI violations.

The eye movement data (Fig. 3–5) show more rapid disambiguation for the NALL scenario vs. NONE. Remarkably, this effect was a) only revealed in the access conditions 1 and 2, where NALL/NONE scenarios were contrasted with the FALSE one, b) more pronounced and earlier in children than adults, immediately following the onset of the quantifier alle (all) (LMM: p<.01). We interpret this effect as pragmatic boost induced by the ISI supported by the NALL scenario. It cannot be attributed to a general bias/preference for such scenario because it was selective for access conditions but absent in condition 3.

The results from this study suggest that: 6yo understand sentences like (1) and compute the associated ISIs, which boost online disambiguation and offline comprehension in a supporting scenario (NALL) in 6-10yo and adults but not in 4-5yo. This effect goes in the opposite direction with respect to the offline judgments, where 6yo showed little or no preference for the context supporting the ISI.

References

[1] Bill, C., Romoli, J., Schwarz, F., & Crain, S. (2016). Scalar Implicatures Versus Presuppositions: The View from Acquisition. Topoi, 35(1), 57–71.[2] Musolino, J. & J. Lidz. 2006. Why children aren’t universally successful with quantification. Linguistics 44:4, 817-852. [3] Lohiniva, K., and Panizza, D. (2016). When pragmatics helps syntax: an eye tracking study on scope ambiguity resolution in 4- to 5-year- old children. To appear in BUCLD 40 proceedings. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.