Binary judgement on under-informative utterances (e.g. Some horses jumped over the fence, when all horses did) is the most widely used methodology to test children’s ability to generate implicatures. Accepting under-informative utterances is considered a failure to generate implicatures. We present off-line and reaction time evidence for the Pragmatic Tolerance Hypothesis, according to which some children who accept under-informative utterances are in fact competent with implicature but do not consider pragmatic violations grave enough to reject the critical utterance. Seventy-five Dutch-speaking four to nine-year-olds completed a binary (Experiment A) and a ternary judgement task (Experiment B). Half of the children who accepted an utterance in Experiment A penalised it in Experiment B. Reaction times revealed that these children experienced a slow-down in the critical utterances in Experiment A, suggesting that they detected the pragmatic violation even though they did not reject it. We propose that binary judgement tasks systematically underestimate children’s competence with pragmatics.
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Katsos, Napoleon & Dorothy V. Bishop. 2008. Pragmatic Tolerance. Paper presented at the
XI International Congress for the Study of Child Language (IASCL)
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Katsos, Napoleon & Dorothy V. Bishop. 2011. Pragmatic tolerance: Implications for the acquisition of informativeness and implicature. Cognition 120(1). 67–81.
Katsos, Napoleon & Nafsika Smith. 2010. Pragmatic Tolerance and speaker-comprehender asymmetries. In Katie Franich, Kate M. Iserman & Lauren L. Keil (eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Boston University Conference in Language Development, 221–232. Cascadilla Press, MA, USA.
Marchena, Ashley de, Inge-Marie Eigsti, Amanda Worek, Kim Emiko Ono & Jesse Snedeker. 2011. Mutual exclusivity in autism spectrum disorders: Testing the pragmatic hypothesis. Cognition 119(1). 96–113.
Neys, Wim De & Walter Schaeken. 2007. When people are more logical under cognitive load: Dual task impact on scalar implicature. Experimental Psychology 54(2). 128–133.
Noveck, Ira A.2001. When children are more logical than adults: Experimental investigations of scalar implicature. Cognition 78(2). 165–188.
Noveck, Ira A. & Andres Posada. 2003. Characterizing the time course of an implicature: An evoked potentials study. Brain and Language 85(2). 203–210.
Noveck, Ira A. & Anne Reboul. 2008. Experimental pragmatics: A Gricean turn in the study of language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12(11). 425–431.
Papafragou, Anna & Julien Musolino. 2003. Scalar implicatures: Experiments at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Cognition 86(3). 253–282.
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2024. Pragmatic competence and pragmatic tolerance in foreign language acquisition—revisiting the case of scalar implicatures. Applied Psycholinguistics 45:4 ► pp. 717 ff.
Wang, Shuyan
2023. Effects of Processing Limits on Computing Scalar Implicatures: Evidence from Child English and Child Mandarin. Language Learning and Development 19:3 ► pp. 345 ff.
Zhang, Jun & Yan Wu
2023. Epistemic reasoning in pragmatic inferencing by non-native speakers: The case of scalar implicatures. Second Language Research 39:3 ► pp. 697 ff.
Syrett, Kristen, Jennifer Austin & Liliana Sanchez
2021. Establishing upper bounds in English monolingual and Heritage Spanish-English bilingual language development. Language Acquisition 28:1 ► pp. 39 ff.
Sikos, Les, Minjae Kim & Daniel J. Grodner
2019. Social Context Modulates Tolerance for Pragmatic Violations in Binary but Not Graded Judgments. Frontiers in Psychology 10
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