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Barner, David; Brooks, Neon; Bale, Alan – Cognition, 2011
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…
Descriptors: Context Effect, Sentences, Role, Inferences
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Grassmann, Susanne; Stracke, Maren; Tomasello, Michael – Cognition, 2009
Many studies have established that children tend to exclude objects for which they already have a name as potential referents of novel words. In the current study we asked whether this exclusion can be triggered by social-pragmatic context alone without pre-existing words as blockers. Two-year-old children watched an adult looking at a novel…
Descriptors: Novelty (Stimulus Dimension), Toddlers, Language Acquisition, Pragmatics
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Preissler, Melissa Allen; Carey, Susan – Cognition, 2005
Young children are readily able to use known labels to constrain hypotheses about the meanings of new words under conditions of referential ambiguity. At issue is the kind of information children use to constrain such hypotheses. According to one theory, children take into account the speaker's intention when solving a referential puzzle. In the…
Descriptors: Inferences, Autism, Language Acquisition, Intention