Data_Sheet_1_Development of Quantitative and Temporal Scalar Implicatures in a Felicity Judgment Task.PDF

Experimental investigations into children’s interpretation of scalar terms show that children have difficulties with scalar implicatures in tasks. In contrast with adults, they are for instance not able to derive the pragmatic interpretation that “some” means “not all” (Noveck, 2001; Papafragou and Musolino, 2003). However, there is also substantial experimental evidence that children are not incapable of drawing scalar inferences and that they are aware of the pragmatic potential of scalar expressions. In these kinds of studies, the prime interest is to discover what conditions facilitate implicature production for children. One of the factors that seem to be difficult for children is the generation of the scalar alternative. In a Felicity Judgment Task (FJT) the alternative is given. Participants are presented with a pair of utterances and asked to choose the most felicitous description. In such a task, even 5-year-old children are reported to show a very good performance. Our study wants to build on this tradition, by using a FJT where not only “some-all” choices are given, but also “some-many” and “many-all.” In combination with a manipulation of the number of successes/failures in the stories, this enabled us to construct control, critical and ambiguous items. We compared the performance of 59 5-year-old children with that of 34 11-year-old children. The results indicated that performance of both age groups was clearly above chance, replicating previous findings. However, for the 5-year-old children, the critical and ambiguous items were more difficult than the control items and they also performed worse on these two types of items than the 11-year-old children. Interestingly with respect to the issue of scalar diversity, the 11-year-old children were also presented temporal items, which turned out to be more difficult than the quantitative ones.

针对儿童对量级词（scalar terms）理解的实验研究表明，儿童在任务中处理量级会话含意（scalar implicatures）时存在困难。与成人不同，例如儿童无法推导出“部分”意为“并非全部”的语用解读（Noveck, 2001; Papafragou和Musolino, 2003）。不过，也有大量实验证据表明，儿童并非无法进行量级推理，且他们能够意识到量级表达的语用潜能。在这类研究中，核心研究目标在于探究哪些条件能够促进儿童产生会话含意。其中一个似乎对儿童而言存在难度的因素是量级替代项的生成。在适宜性判断任务（Felicity Judgment Task, FJT）中，替代项会被直接提供。研究者会向被试呈现一对话语，并要求其选择最得体的描述。据报道，在此类任务中，即便5岁儿童也能表现出极佳的完成水平。本研究旨在沿袭这一研究脉络，采用的适宜性判断任务不仅包含“部分-全部”的选项对，还增设了“部分-许多”与“许多-全部”的选项对。结合对实验故事中成功/失败次数的实验操控，我们得以构建控制组、关键组与歧义组三类实验项目。我们对比了59名5岁儿童与34名11岁儿童的完成表现。结果显示，两个年龄组的成绩均显著高于随机水平，重复了此前的研究结论。不过，对于5岁儿童而言，关键组与歧义组项目的难度高于控制组项目，且他们在这两类项目上的表现也劣于11岁儿童。值得关注的是，针对量级多样性（scalar diversity）这一议题，本研究还向11岁儿童呈现了时间量级项目，结果显示这类项目的难度高于数量量级项目。