University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK.
Cognition. 2023 Oct;239:105572. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105572. Epub 2023 Jul 24.
Sentences can be enriched by considering what the speaker does not say but could have done. Children, however, struggle to derive one type of such enrichments, scalar implicatures. A popular explanation for this, the lexical alternatives account, is that they do not have lexical knowledge of the appropriate alternatives to generate the implicature. Namely, children are unaware of the scalar relationship between some and all. We conducted a priming study with N = 72 children, aged 5;1 years, and an adult sample, N = 51, to test this hypothesis. Participants were exposed to prime trials of strong, alternative, or weak sentences involving scalar or ad hoc expressions, and then saw a target trial that could be interpreted in either way. Consistent with previous studies, children were reluctant to derive scalar implicatures. However, there were two novel findings. (1) Children responded with twice the rate of ad hoc implicature responses than adults, suggesting that the implicature was the developmentally prior interpretation for ad hoc expressions. (2) Children showed robust priming effects, suggesting that children are aware of the scalar relationship between some and all, even if they choose not to derive the implicature. This suggests that the root cause of the scalar implicature deficit is not due to the absence of lexical knowledge of the relationship between some and all.
通过考虑说话者没有说但本可以说的内容，句子可以得到丰富。然而，儿童很难推导出一种这样的丰富形式，即数量级蕴含。对于这种情况，一种流行的解释是词汇替代理论，即他们没有生成蕴含所需的适当替代词汇的词汇知识。也就是说，儿童不知道某些和所有之间的数量级关系。我们进行了一项有 72 名 5 岁 1 个月大的儿童和 51 名成人样本参与的启动研究，以检验这一假设。参与者接触了涉及数量级或临时表达的强、替代或弱句子的启动试验，然后看到了一个可以用两种方式解释的目标试验。与之前的研究一致，儿童不愿意推导出数量级蕴含。然而，有两个新发现。(1)儿童对临时蕴含的反应速度是成人的两倍，这表明对于临时表达，蕴含是发展上优先的解释。(2)儿童表现出了强大的启动效应，这表明儿童即使选择不推导蕴含，也意识到了某些和所有之间的数量级关系。这表明数量级蕴含缺陷的根本原因不是因为缺乏关于某些和所有之间关系的词汇知识。
