Measuring Scalar Implicature: Developing A Paradigm
Gogel, Hannah B.
2011
- Scalar implicatures are the inferences made by listeners when a speaker uses the weaker of two terms on a scale. This paper investigates the processing of the word some and under what contexts six to nine year olds interpret the term to be and not be consistent with the term all. Previous online processing tasks and offline judgment task research suggests that listeners start to understand some to ... read moremean only a subset and not a whole set sometime shortly after age five (Huang & Snedeker, 2009b; Huang, Spelke, & Snedeker, n.d.; Noveck, 2001; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003; Pouscoulous, Noveck, Politzer & Bastide, 2007). By creating new experiments based off of two previously run paradigms (Huang & Snedeker, 2009; Huang, Spelke, & Snedeker, n.d.) we compared online and offline data of six to nine year olds' interpretations of the word some to find that this age range of children does not make implicatures during processing, but seem to make them during offline tasks by age eight and possibly earlier. These results suggest that six to nine year olds either need specific contexts or extended time to make such implicatures and give us insight into what contexts may be useful for priming or teaching such pragmatic interpretations.read less
- ID:
- sf268g71z
- Component ID:
- tufts:UA005.006.123.00001
- To Cite:
- TARC Citation Guide EndNote
