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Show me the pragmatic contribution: a developmental investigation of contrastive inference*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2013

EDMUNDO KRONMÜLLER ,
TIFFANY MORISSEAU  and
IRA A. NOVECK
EDMUNDO KRONMÜLLER*
Affiliation:
Escuela de Psicología, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
TIFFANY MORISSEAU
Affiliation:
Laboratoire sur le Langage, le Cerveau et la Cognition (L2C2, UMR5230), Centre de recherche français à Jérusalem (CRFJ)
IRA A. NOVECK
Affiliation:
Laboratoire sur le Langage, le Cerveau et la Cognition (L2C2, UMR5230), Centre de recherche français à Jérusalem (CRFJ)
*
Address for correspondence: e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

An utterance such as ‘Show me the large rabbit’ potentially generates a contrastive inference, i.e., the article the and the adjective large allow listeners to pragmatically infer the existence of other entities having the same noun (e.g. a small rabbit). The primary way to measure children's ability to carry out this pragmatic inference has been through tasks that measure infelicity detection. We argue that such studies are not as revealing as one might assume because they force children to adopt a metalinguistic stance and they consider infelicity detection as tantamount to contrastive inference-making. To address these concerns, we develop a game-like situation in which all utterances remain felicitous. Moreover, we make a distinction between responses that are revealing of a pragmatic interpretation and responses that are revealing of a reliance on the utterance's linguistically encoded meaning (i.e., a lack of contrastive inference). Three experiments with seven-year-olds, ten-year-olds, and adults show that pragmatic interpretations do not emerge among seven-year-olds, that ten-year-olds do not show adult-like performance, and that adults are not at ceiling. We conclude that contrastive inference-making is an effortful process and that the ability to detect such gains-in-information through language increases with age.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 41 , Issue 5 , September 2014 , pp. 985 - 1014
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

[*]

Portions of this research were carried out while the first author was supported by a Fyssen Fondation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Laboratoire sur le Langage, le Cerveau et la Cognition in Lyon, France. This research was also funded by a Conicyt-Chile grant to the first author.

References

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