Noveck I A
Institut des Sciences Cognitives, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, Lyon, France.
Cognition. 2001 Feb;78(2):165-88. doi: 10.1016/s0010-0277(00)00114-1.
A conversational implicature is an inference that consists of attributing to a speaker an implicit meaning that goes beyond the explicit linguistic meaning of an utterance. This paper experimentally investigates scalar implicature, a paradigmatic case of implicature in which a speaker's use of a term like Some indicates that the speaker had reasons not to use a more informative term from the same scale, e.g. All; thus, Some implicates Not all. Pragmatic theorists like Grice would predict that a pragmatic interpretation is determined only after its explicit, logical meaning is incorporated (e.g. where Some means at least one). The present work aims to developmentally examine this prediction by showing how younger, albeit competent, reasoners initially treat a relatively weak term logically before becoming aware of its pragmatic potential. Three experiments are presented. Experiment 1 presents a modal reasoning scenario offering an exhaustive set of conclusions; critical among these is participants' evaluation of a statement expressing Might be x when the context indicates that the stronger Must be x is true. The conversationally-infelicitous Might be x can be understood logically (e.g. as compatible with Must) or pragmatically (as exclusive to Must). Results from 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds as well as adults revealed that (a) 7-year-olds are the youngest to demonstrate modal competence overall and that (b) 7- and 9-year-olds treat the infelicitous Might logically significantly more often than adults do. Experiment 2 showed how training with the modal task can suspend the implicatures for adults. Experiment 3 provides converging evidence of the developmental pragmatic effect with the French existential quantifier Certains (Some). While linguistically-sophisticated children (8- and 10-year-olds olds) typically treat Certains as compatible with Tous (All), adults are equivocal. These results, which are consistent with unanticipated findings in classic developmental papers, reveal a consistent ordering in which representations of weak scalar terms tend to be treated logically by young competent participants and more pragmatically by older ones. This work is also relevant to the treatment of scalar implicatures in the reasoning literature.
会话含义是一种推理，它包括赋予说话者一种隐含意义，这种隐含意义超出了话语明确的语言意义。本文通过实验研究了等级含义，这是含义的一个典型例子，即说话者使用“一些”这样的词表明说话者有理由不使用同一等级中信息量更大的词，例如“所有”；因此，“一些”隐含着“并非所有”。像格赖斯这样的语用理论家会预测，只有在纳入其明确的逻辑意义之后（例如“一些”表示至少一个），才会确定语用解释。目前的研究旨在通过展示年龄较小但有能力的推理者在意识到其语用潜力之前最初如何从逻辑上对待一个相对较弱的词，来从发展角度检验这一预测。本文呈现了三个实验。实验1呈现了一个模态推理场景，提供了一组详尽的结论；其中关键的是参与者对“可能是x”这一陈述的评估，此时语境表明更强的“一定是x”是真的。在会话中不合适的“可能是x”可以从逻辑上理解（例如与“一定”兼容）或从语用角度理解（与“一定”互斥）。5岁、7岁、9岁儿童以及成年人的结果表明：（a）7岁儿童是总体上最年幼的表现出模态能力的群体，并且（b）7岁和9岁儿童从逻辑上对待不合适的“可能”的频率明显高于成年人。实验2展示了模态任务训练如何能消除成年人的含义。实验3提供了关于法语存在量词“某些”（相当于“一些”）的发展语用效应的趋同证据。虽然语言能力较强的儿童（8岁和10岁）通常将“某些”视为与“所有”兼容，但成年人的态度则模棱两可。这些结果与经典发展文献中未预期到的发现一致，揭示了一种一致的顺序，即年幼且有能力的参与者倾向于从逻辑上对待弱等级词的表征，而年长的参与者则更多地从语用角度对待。这项研究也与推理文献中等级含义的处理相关。
