According to Adams's Thesis, the acceptability of an indicative conditional sentence goes by the conditional probability of its consequent given its antecedent. We test, for the first time, whether this thesis is descriptively correct and show that it is not; in particular, we show that it yields the wrong predictions for people's judgments of the…

When toddlers view an event while hearing a novel verb, the verb's syntactic context has been shown to help them identify its meaning. The current work takes this finding one step further to reveal that even in the absence of an accompanying event, syntactic information supports toddlers' identification of verb meaning. Two-year-olds were first…

Prior research suggests that preschoolers can generalize object properties based on category information conveyed by semantically-similar labels. However, previous research did not control for co-occurrence probability of labels in natural speech. The current studies re-assessed children's generalization with semantically-similar labels.…

When faced with a sentence like, "Some of the toys are on the table", adults, but not preschoolers, compute a scalar implicature, taking the sentence to imply that not all the toys are on the table. This paper explores the hypothesis that children fail to compute scalar implicatures because they lack knowledge of relevant scalar alternatives to…

The time-course of representing others' perspectives is inconclusive across the currently available models of ToM processing. We report two visual-world studies investigating how knowledge about a character's basic preferences (e.g. "Tom's favourite colour is pink") and higher-order desires (his wish to keep this preference secret) compete to…

Infants heard sentences in which prosodic structure was either consistent or inconsistent with the syntactic structure. Results suggest that the prosodic information in an individual sentence is not always sufficient to assign a syntactic structure and that learners must engage in active inferential processes to arrive at the correct syntactic…

Recent research in semantics and pragmatics has revived the debate about whether there are two cognitively distinct categories of conversational implicatures: generalised and particularised. Generalised conversational implicatures are so-called because they seem to arise more or less independently of contextual support. Particularised implicatures…

Three experiments examined understanding of scalar implicature, specifically understanding that use of a term (e.g., some) indicates the speaker had reasons not to use a more informative term (e.g., all). Results reveal consistent ordering in which representations of weak scalar terms tend to be treated logically by young competent participants…

Argues that the syntactic and mental model accounts of the suppression effect in deductive reasoning are inadequate. Proposes a relative salience model. Describes a test of predictions from this model in a suppression model, which obtained evidence of convergent validity for the salience construct. Results could not be reconciled with either the…