AUTHOR=Eiteljoerge Sarah F. V. , Pouscoulous Nausicaa , Lieven Elena V. M. 

TITLE=Some Pieces Are Missing: Implicature Production in Children

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=9

YEAR=2018

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01928

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01928

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>Until at least 4 years of age, children, unlike adults, interpret <italic>some</italic> as compatible with <italic>all</italic>. The inability to draw the pragmatic inference leading to interpret <italic>some</italic> as <italic>not all</italic>, could be taken to indicate a delay in pragmatic abilities, despite evidence of other early pragmatic skills. However, little is known about how the production of these implicature develops. We conducted a corpus study on early production and perception of the scalar term <italic>some</italic> in British English. Children's utterances containing <italic>some</italic> were extracted from the dense corpora of five children aged 2;00 to 5;01 (<italic>N</italic> = 5,276), and analysed alongside a portion of their caregivers' utterances with <italic>some</italic> (<italic>N</italic> = 9,030). These were coded into structural and contextual categories allowing for judgments on the probability of a scalar implicature being intended. The findings indicate that children begin producing and interpreting implicatures in a pragmatic way during their third year of life, shortly after they first produce <italic>some</italic>. Their production of <italic>some</italic> implicatures is low but matches their parents' input in frequency. Interestingly, the mothers' production of implicatures also increases as a function of the children's age. The data suggest that as soon as they acquire <italic>some</italic>, children are fully competent in its production and mirror adult production. The contrast between the very early implicature production we find and the relatively late implicature comprehension established in the literature calls for an explanation; possibly in terms of the processing cost of implicature derivation. Additionally, <italic>some</italic> is multifaceted, and thus, implicatures are infrequent, and structurally and contextually constrained in both populations.</p>