Young children excel at pragmatic inferences known as ad hoc quantity implicatures: they can infer, for example, that a speaker who said "the card with apples" meant the card with "nothing but" apples. However, it is not known whether children take into account the speaker's perspective in deriving such inferences, as adults…

Despite the seemingly simple mapping between adjectives and perceptual properties (e.g., color, texture), preschool children have difficulty establishing the appropriate extension of novel adjectives. When children hear a novel adjective applied to an individual object, they successfully extend the adjective to other members of the same object…

The present study reports a large, cross-sectional study of Mandarin-speaking children's ability to compute quantity implicatures. To chart the developmental trajectory of this pragmatic ability, we tested 225 Mandarin-speaking children aged 4-8 years on their interpretations of scalar and non-scalar implicatures, as well as numerals. Scalar…

Adults find negative sentences difficult to process, but an informative context can facilitate processing substantially, suggesting that much of this difficulty may come from the pragmatics of negation. Are children sensitive to the pragmatics of negation as well? Although children perform poorly on many tests of negation comprehension, we argue…

For adults, "no" and "not" change the truth-value of sentences they compose with. To investigate children's emerging understanding of these words, an experimenter hid a ball in a bucket or a truck, then gave an affirmative or negative clue (Experiment 1: "It's not in the bucket"; Experiment 2: "Is it in the…

When learning verb meanings, learners capitalize on universal linguistic correspondences between syntactic and semantic structure. For instance, upon hearing the transitive sentence "the boy is glorping the girl," 2-year-olds prefer a two-participant event (e.g., a boy making a girl spin) over two simultaneous one-participant events (a…