Center for Brain and Cognition, Departament de Tecnologies de la Informació i les Comunicacions, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, calle Ramon Trias Fargas 25-27, 08005 Barcelona, Spain.
ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Australian Hearing Hub, 16 University Avenue, Macquarie University, 2109 NSW, Australia.
Cognition. 2018 Sep;178:178-192. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.04.020. Epub 2018 Jun 4.
Previous developmental studies have revealed variation in children's ability to compute scalar inferences. While children have been shown to struggle with standard scalar inferences (e.g., with scalar quantifiers like "some") (Chierchia, Crain, Guasti, Gualmini, & Meroni, 2001; Guasti et al., 2005; Noveck, 2001; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003), there is also a growing handful of inferences that children have been reported to derive quite readily (Barner & Bachrach, 2010; Hochstein, Bale, Fox, & Barner, 2016; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003; Singh, Wexler, Astle-Rahim, Kamawar, & Fox, 2016; Stiller, Goodman, & Frank, 2015; Tieu, Romoli, Zhou, & Crain, 2016; Tieu et al., 2017). One recent approach, which we refer to as the Alternatives-based approach, attributes the variability in children's performance to limitations in how children engage with the alternative sentences that are required to compute the relevant inferences. Specifically, if the alternative sentences can be generated by simplifying the assertion, rather than by lexically replacing one scalar term with another, children should be better able to compute the inference. In this paper, we investigated this prediction by assessing how children and adults interpret sentences that embed disjunction under a universal quantifier, such as "Every elephant caught a big butterfly or a small butterfly". For adults, such sentences typically give rise to the distributive inference that some elephant caught a big butterfly and some elephant caught a small butterfly (Crnič, Chemla, & Fox, 2015; Fox, 2007; Gazdar, 1979). Another possible interpretation, though not one typically accessed by adults, is the conjunctive inference that every elephant caught a big butterfly and a small butterfly (Singh, Wexler, Astle-Rahim, Kamawar, & Fox, 2016). Crucially, for our purposes, it has been argued that both of these inferences can be derived using alternatives that are generated by deleting parts of the asserted sentence, rather than through lexical replacement, making these sentences an ideal test case for evaluating the predictions of the Alternatives-based approach. The findings of our experimental study reveal that children are indeed able to successfully compute this class of inferences, providing support for the Alternatives-based approach as a viable explanation of children's variable success in computing scalar inferences.
先前的发展研究揭示了儿童在计算标量推理方面的能力存在差异。虽然儿童在处理标准标量推理（例如，处理像“一些”这样的标量量词）时遇到了困难（Chierchia、Crain、Guasti、Gualmini 和 Meroni，2001；Guasti 等人，2005；Noveck，2001；Papafragou 和 Musolino，2003），但也有越来越多的推理被报道说儿童很容易得出结论（Barner 和 Bachrach，2010；Hochstein、Bale、Fox 和 Barner，2016；Papafragou 和 Musolino，2003；Singh、Wexler、Astle-Rahim、Kamawar 和 Fox，2016；Stiller、Goodman 和 Frank，2015；Tieu、Romoli、Zhou 和 Crain，2016；Tieu 等人，2017）。最近的一种方法，我们称之为基于替代的方法，将儿童表现的可变性归因于儿童在处理计算相关推理所需的替代句子时的局限性。具体来说，如果替代句子可以通过简化断言来生成，而不是通过用另一个标量术语替换一个标量术语，那么儿童应该能够更好地计算推理。在本文中，我们通过评估儿童和成人如何解释在普遍量词下嵌入析取的句子来检验这一预测，例如“每只大象都捕捉了一只大蝴蝶或一只小蝴蝶”。对于成年人来说，这样的句子通常会产生一种分配推理，即有些大象捕捉了一只大蝴蝶，有些大象捕捉了一只小蝴蝶（Crnič、Chemla 和 Fox，2015；Fox，2007；Gazdar，1979）。另一种可能的解释，尽管不是成年人通常会采用的解释，是每个大象都捕捉了一只大蝴蝶和一只小蝴蝶的合取推理（Singh、Wexler、Astle-Rahim、Kamawar 和 Fox，2016）。至关重要的是，就我们的目的而言，有人认为这两种推理都可以通过删除断言句子的部分而生成的替代句子来推导，而不是通过词汇替换，这使得这些句子成为评估基于替代的方法预测的理想测试案例。我们的实验研究结果表明，儿童确实能够成功地计算出这一类推理，为基于替代的方法作为儿童在计算标量推理方面的可变成功的可行解释提供了支持。
