Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA.
Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Dev Sci. 2020 May;23(3):e12920. doi: 10.1111/desc.12920. Epub 2019 Nov 22.
Human communication relies on the ability to take into account the speaker's mental state to infer the intended meaning of an utterance in context. For example, a sentence such as 'Some of the animals are safe to pet' can be interpreted as giving rise to the inference 'Some and not all animals are safe to pet' when uttered by an expert. The same inference, known as a scalar implicature, does not arise when the sentence is spoken by someone with partial knowledge. Adults have been shown to derive scalar implicatures in accordance with the speaker's knowledge state, but in young children this ability is debated. Here, we revisit this question using a simple visual world paradigm. We find that both 4- and 5-year-olds successfully incorporate speaker knowledge into the derivation of scalar inferences. However, this ability does not generalize immediately to non-linguistic communicative contexts. These findings have important implications for the development of pragmatic abilities.
人类交流依赖于一种能力，即根据说话者的心理状态，在语境中推断话语的意图。例如，当专家说出“有些动物可以安全抚摸”这句话时，它可以被解释为产生了“有些动物而不是所有动物都可以安全抚摸”的推断。当这句话由一个知识不全面的人说出时，就不会产生这种被称为“数量级蕴涵”的推断。成年人已经被证明能够根据说话者的知识状态得出数量级蕴涵，但在幼儿中，这种能力是有争议的。在这里，我们使用一个简单的视觉世界范式重新研究了这个问题。我们发现，4 岁和 5 岁的儿童都能够成功地将说话者的知识纳入数量级推断的推导中。然而，这种能力并不能立即推广到非语言交际情境中。这些发现对语用能力的发展具有重要意义。
