2018 Sat Poster 6382

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Poster Session II, Metcalf Small | 3:15pm

When OR is assigned a conjunctive inference in child language
H. Huang, S. Crain

It has been proposed that children license a conjunctive inference in response to ordinary statements with disjunction, without a licensing expression, e.g., is allowed to [1,2]. The proposal is that children invoke the same (exhaustification) algorithm that adults apply in disjunctive statements that contain a licensing expression [3,4]. More specifically, children are expected to license the conjunctive inference (1b) from (1a), just as adults license the conjunctive inference (2b) from (2a). The rates of children’s conjunctive inferences vary across studies, however, and several studies have not reported the finding that children license conjunctive inferences in responding to sentences with disjunction [5,6,7]. In 3 experiments, we investigated one possible source of the different findings: children only license conjunctive inferences if there are no entities in the experimental workspace beyond those mentioned in the disjunction phrase of the test sentences.

The experiments used a Truth Value Judgment Task [8] with Mandarin-speaking children. Experiment 1 established a baseline level of performance, by assessing children’s conjunctive inferences in response to sentences with a deontic modal verb, as in (3). The contexts for Experiment 2 included additional entities, beyond those mentioned in the test sentences (see Figure 1)，but the test sentences did not include a modal verb, such as (4). Experiment 3 presented the same test sentences as Experiment 2, but the contexts only included objects that were mentioned in the test sentences. The same 22 children participated in Experiments 1 and 2; they ranged in age from 4;10 to 5;8(mean 5;6). An additional 23 children participated in Experiment 3; they ranged in age from 3;8 to 5;11 (mean 4;7). Each experiment was also conducted with a control group of adult Mandarin speakers.

In Experiment 1, the child and adult participants consistently licensed conjunctive inferences, rejecting sentences with a deontic modal verb when only one of the disjuncts was true (child 95%, adult 98%) (cf. [9,10]). By contrast, both groups consistently accepted sentences without a deontic modal verb in the same contexts when only one disjunct was true (child 86%, adult 98%); children continued to accept the test sentences when both disjuncts were true (98%), whereas the rate of acceptance dropped to 75% for adults, presumably due to an exclusivity inference. Children differed from adults in Experient 3, where the contexts only contained objects that were mentioned in the disjunction phrase. In contrast to adults, children rejected sentences without a modal verb when only one disjunct was true (child 57%, adult 0%) and accepted the test sentences when both disjuncts were true (child 96%, adult 37%). The findings suggest that both children and adults license conjunctive inferences in disjunctive sentences with a licensing expression, but unlike adults, children also license conjunctive inferences in contexts that only contain objects that are mentioned in the test sentences. The findings reveal the influence of contextual alternatives on children’s pragmatic inferences in interpreting sentences with disjunction (cf. [11]).

References

  1. Singh, Raj, Ken Wexler, Andrea Astle, Deepthi Kamawar & Danny Fox. 2016. Children interpret disjunction as conjunction: Consequences for theories of implicature and child development. Natural Language Semantics 24:4.305-352.
  2. Tieu, Lyn, Kazuko Yatsuhiro, Alexandre Cremers, Jacopo Romoli, Uli Sauerland & Emmanuel Chemla. 2017. On the role of alternatives in the acquisition of simple and complex disjunctions in French and Japanese. Journal of Semantics 2017: 1-26.
  3. Fox, Danny. 2007. Free choice and the theory of scalar implicatures. Presupposition and Implicature in Compositional Semantics (Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition) by Uli Sauerland & Penka Stateva, 71-120. Houndmills, Basingstoke & Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan.
  4. Chierchia, Gennaro. 2013. Logic in grammar: Polarity, free choice and intervention. Oxford: Oxford University
  5. Chierchia, Gennaro, Maria Teresa Guasti, Andrea Gualmini, Luisa Meroni, Stephen Crain & Francesca Foppolo. 2004. Semantic and pragmatic competence in children’s and adults’ comprehension of or. In Ira A. Noveck & Dan Sperber (eds.), Experimental pragmatics, 283-300. New York: Palgrave
  6. Gualmini, Andrea, Stephen Crain & Luisa Meroni. 2000. Acquisition of disjunction in conditional statements. In S. Catherine Howell, Sarah A. Fish & Thea Keith-Lucas (eds.), Proceedings of the 24th annual Boston University conference on language development, 367-378. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  7. Guasti, Maria Teresa, Gennaro Chierchia, Stephen Crain, Francesca Foppolo, Andrea Gualmini & Luisa Meroni. 2005. Why children and adults sometimes (but not always) compute implicatures. Language and Cognitive Processes 667–696.
  8. Crain, Stephen & Rosalind Thornton. 1998. Investigations in universal grammar: A guide to experiments on the acquisition of syntax and semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT
  9. Tieu, Lyn, Jacopo Romoli, Peng Zhou & Stephen Crain. 2016. Children’s knowledge of free choice inferences and scalar implicatures. Journal of Semantics 33:2.269-298.
  10. Huang, Aijun, & Stephen Crain. 2014. Acquisition of the polarity sensitive item renhe ‘any’ in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Child Language 861-889.
  11. Barner, David, Neon Brooks & Alan Bale. 2011. Accessing the unsaid: The role of scalar alternatives in children’s pragmatic inference. Cognition 118:1.84-93.