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Relevance and Definition*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Rita Watson
Rita Watson*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
*
Department of Educational Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B. C., V6T 1X5, Canada.
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Abstract

The study examined whether the use of superordinate terms in children's definitions was predicted by relevance theory. Two hundred and six children aged five to ten years gave definitions for 16 basic-level words and four superordinate words from natural kind and artefact semantic domains. Superordinate terms were used more frequently when they supported more inferences. This was evidenced by their more frequent use in natural kind than in artefact domains, and more frequent use when the superordinate was itself defined by a semantically complex expression. When used, superordinates also usually occurred at the beginning of the definitional expression. It is argued that these findings reflect the speaker's intention to achieve optimal relevance, that is, to achieve maximum contextual effects with the least processing effort.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , February 1995 , pp. 211 - 222
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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Footnotes

[*]

Thanks to Dan Sperber, Yitzhak Schlesinger and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts; responsibility for remaining flaws rests with the author. A version of this paper was presented to the International Association for the Study of Child Language, Trieste, Italy, 1993. The research reported here was supported by grant No. 456-82-2591 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada held by the author at the Center for Applied Cognitive Science, O.I.S.E., Toronto; and by SSHRC grant No. 410-88-0843 held by the author at the University of British Columbia.

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