Stanford University.
University of California, San Diego.
Child Dev. 2018 Nov;89(6):e572-e593. doi: 10.1111/cdev.13014. Epub 2017 Dec 29.
Adults routinely use the context of utterances to infer a meaning beyond the literal semantics of their words (e.g., inferring from "She ate some of the cookies" that she ate some, but not all). Contrasting children's (N = 209) comprehension of scalar implicatures using quantifiers with contextually derived ad hoc implicatures revealed that 4- to 5-year-olds reliably computed ad hoc, but not scalar, implicatures (Experiment 1). Unexpectedly, performance with "some" and "none" was correlated (Experiments 1 and 2). An individual differences study revealed a correlation between quantifier knowledge and implicature success (Experiment 3); a control study ruled out other factors (Experiment 4). These findings suggest that some failures with scalar implicatures may be rooted in a lack of semantic knowledge rather than general pragmatic or processing demands.
成年人通常会根据话语的上下文来推断超出字面语义的含义（例如，从“She ate some of the cookies”推断出她吃了一些，但不是全部）。通过对比儿童（N=209）对使用量词的数量级含义和基于上下文的特定含义的理解，发现 4 至 5 岁的儿童能够可靠地计算特定含义，但不能计算数量级含义（实验 1）。出乎意料的是，“一些”和“没有”的表现呈相关关系（实验 1 和 2）。一项个体差异研究表明，量词知识与隐含意义的成功之间存在相关性（实验 3）；一项控制研究排除了其他因素（实验 4）。这些发现表明，在数量级含义方面的一些失败可能源于缺乏语义知识，而不是一般的语用或处理需求。
