Children and Pragmatic Implicatures: A Test of the Pragmatic Tolerance Hypothesis with Different Tasks

Children and Pragmatic Implicatures: A Test of the Pragmatic Tolerance Hypothesis with Different Tasks Katrijn Pipijn (Katrijn.Pipijn@Ppw.Kuleuven.Be) Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, Tiensestraat 102 Bus 3711 3000 LEUVEN, Belgium Walter Schaeken (Walter.Schaeken@Ppw.Kuleuven.Be) Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, Tiensestraat 102 Bus 3711 3000 LEUVEN, Belgium Abstract The pragmatic tolerance hypothesis (Katsos & Smith, 2010) was originated to explain the difference between children and adults concerning scalar implicatures. They introduced the use of a Likert-scale to test this hypothesis. We conducted a study with a within subjects design in which we compare children‟s binary and scalar responses to the same underinformative sentences. We also used two separate tasks to look at the effects of task difficulty on performance. The results show that the more difficult task, Euler circles, lead to less pragmatic responses compared to the easier task, drawings. Confirming the study by Katsos and Smith (2010; see also Katsos & Bishop, 2011) children choose the middle options on the scale more when they are confronted with underinformative sentences and they choose more extreme options for the control sentences. The comparison with the binary responses however, reveal that the link between the two measuring methods is not as straight forward as we would think. Keywords: Scalar Implicatures; underinformative sentences; children; scalar responses pragmatic tolerance. Introduction Communication is not always as straightforward as one might think. In 1989 Grice published his work on the cooperative principle that was meant to explain how our human interaction can be described. The cooperative principle expects a person to interact in a way that furthers the purpose of the conversation and indicates that a second person expects the first person to do so. The cooperative principle allows for implicatures to be used. When a person uses an implicature, the meaning of what that person says is not explicitly communicated, but can nonetheless be derived from what he says. The utterance is under-informative, more information could have been given but has not. For example when a wife asks her husband whether he‟ll be home for supper, and the husband answers that he has a meeting that will run late that day, then the husband is using an implicature. His wife will not expect him for dinner. One can assume that she accepts the meeting running late will be the reason, or at least a possible reason, that the husband will not be present at dinner. Nevertheless it is still possible that the husband will appear for dinner, for the implicature is cancellable. It is possible that the husband just meant he would be a little late for dinner, still he would not have lied in his earlier utterance. One specific form of implicatures are scalar implicatures, which we will focus on in this paper. As the name implies, scalar implicatures consist of words that can be situated on a scale, known as Horn scales (see Horn, 1984). These words range from less informative to more informative, for example a scale containing words like , and . Each word further on the scale contains more elements of a group. When a speaker uses a certain less informative word in an utterance, it is implicated that the more informative word is not applicable. When a person uses the word „some‟, the word „all‟ would not be appropriate. It is considered a mutual understanding between speaker and recipient that the speaker would have used the more informative word if it were suitable. Nevertheless he deliberately chose to use the less informative word on the scale therefore the more informative is not suitable. For example when the prime minister says „Some banks are collapsing due to the financial crisis‟, a citizen can assume that „not all‟ banks are collapsing due to this crisis, for the expression of „some‟ implicates „not all‟. The citizen presumes that the prime minister would have said „All banks are collapsing due to the financial crisis‟ is this were the case. If a few months later the prime minister makes the announcement „All the banks have collapsed due to the financial crisis‟, this would not be a withdrawal of his earlier statement. Specific to implicatures is that they are cancellable in only one direction. When a speaker uses the weaker term „some‟, it can later be easily corrected to „all‟. Yet when a speaker initially uses the stronger term „all‟, it is not possible to change it to „some‟ later on. At least not without admitting one was erroneous the first time. The stronger term „all‟ entails the weaker term „some‟ but not vice versa. When a speaker uses the word „some‟ in an utterance, there are two different ways to interpret this weak scalar term. The first way is the pragmatic way that was described above. A recipient might produce a scalar implicature and assume that the speaker meant „some and not all‟ with the statement. Yet another way of interpreting the word „some‟ is a purely explicit logical interpretation. The explicit meaning of the word „some‟ is „at least one and possibly all‟. Both interpretation of the word are equally correct and it is the choice of the recipient on how he will interpret it.