Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, CA 92093-0109, USA.
Cognition. 2011 Jan;118(1):84-93. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.10.010. Epub 2010 Nov 11.
When faced with a sentence like, "Some of the toys are on the table", adults, but not preschoolers, compute a scalar implicature, taking the sentence to imply that not all the toys are on the table. This paper explores the hypothesis that children fail to compute scalar implicatures because they lack knowledge of relevant scalar alternatives to words like "some". Four-year-olds were shown pictures in which three out of three objects fit a description (e.g., three animals reading), and were asked to evaluate statements that relied on context-independent alternatives (e.g., knowing that all is an alternative to some for the utterance "Some of the animals are reading") or contextual alternatives (e.g., knowing that the set of all three visible animals is an alternative to a set of two for the utterance "Only the cat and the dog are reading"). Children failed to reject the false statements containing context-independent scales even when the word only was used (e.g., only some), but correctly rejected equivalent statements containing contextual alternatives (e.g., only the cat and dog). These results support the hypothesis that children's difficulties with scalar implicature are due to a failure to generate relevant alternatives for specific scales. Consequences for number word learning are also discussed.
当面对像“有些玩具在桌子上”这样的句子时，成年人而不是学龄前儿童会计算出一个标量蕴涵，认为这句话暗示并非所有的玩具都在桌子上。本文探讨了这样一种假设，即儿童无法计算标量蕴涵，是因为他们缺乏对像“有些”这样的词的相关标量替代词的知识。研究人员向 4 岁的儿童展示了三张图片，其中三张物体符合描述（例如，三只动物在阅读），并要求他们评估基于上下文无关替代词（例如，知道所有是对“有些动物在阅读”这句话的替代词）或上下文替代词（例如，知道所有三个可见动物的集合是对“只有猫和狗在阅读”这句话中两个动物的集合的替代词）的语句。即使使用了单词 only（例如 only some），儿童也无法拒绝包含上下文无关标量的错误陈述，但他们正确地拒绝了包含上下文替代词的等效陈述（例如 only the cat and dog）。这些结果支持了这样一种假设，即儿童在标量蕴涵方面的困难是由于无法为特定标量生成相关替代词。此外，本文还讨论了这些结果对数字词学习的影响。
