Examined young children's interpretations of the meanings of indirect speech acts (e.g. it's 10 o'clock) in paragraphs of a contextual type biasing a literal interpretation (time of day) or an extraliteral interpretation (time to prepare for bed). Memory for these meanings was also assessed. (Author/JMB)

Examines the understanding of young children and adults of the speaker's use of definite descriptions. Subjects were 64 first and fourth graders and 32 college students. (MP)

Results suggest that children can use the rules of conversational sequencing to evaluate the need for an inference to the speaker's intent when speakers deliberately violate a rule. This ability is acquired by six or seven years of age, but children do not correctly infer the speaker's intent until they are eight or nine years old. (Author/RH)

Examines children's ability to make both logical and pragmatic presuppositional inferences and to discriminate between the two as a function of contextual information. Five- and eight-year-old children served as subjects. (BD)

Examines whether young children and adults are able to interpret sarcastic utterances and whether placements of contextual information before or after the utterance differentially affect interpretation. Results obtained from first and third graders and from college students indicated that different placements of contextual information do affect…

Young children and college-age adults were read short stories describing a consistent or inconsistent adult response to a child's action and were given additional information that resolved or failed to resolve the inconsistency. Results concerned subjects' abilities to detect and resolve the inconsistency and to repair a comprehension problem in…

Hypothesizes that young children respond incorrectly in interpreting ambiguous communications in referential tasks because they respond to the elocutionary performative force rather than the locutionary content of the communications. Results of two experiments tended to confirm the hypothesis. (Author/RH)

Examined six- and eight-year-old children's use of contextual expectations to detect inconsistencies in story information and their ability to discriminate between information that resolved or was irrelevant to these inconsistencies. Results showed that six-year-olds frequently detected inconsistent events but that they failed to discriminate…

Children's use of contextual discrepancy and stressed intonation to interpret literal form and illocutionary function in the use of ironic utterances was examined in two experiments, each using first- and third-grade children and college-age adults. Results suggest a complex relationship between literal form and illocutionary function in…

Experiments revealed that children seemed able to integrate multiple sources of information but were more dependent on clue support and generally less likely to infer reason than adults. Children were more likely than adults to reject premise as an explanation of outcome. Only fourth-graders and adults modified inferences in response to resolution…

Four experiments examined the possibility that second and fourth graders and college students are sensitive to inference constraint when they make causal inferences and assess their understanding of a story. Inference likelihood and understanding ratings varied with constraint for all ages. Results suggest that comprehension monitoring and text…