Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Scalar implicatures: experiments at the semantics-pragmatics interface.

Anna Papafragou1, Julien Musolino

  • 1Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19014, USA. anna4@linc.cis.upenn.edu

Cognition
|December 18, 2002
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Dwell Times Reveal Effects of Abstract Event Type on Attention Allocation.

Cognitive science·2026
Same author

Representation of event boundedness in English and Mandarin speakers.

Cognition·2026
Same author

Evidence for individual differences in the temporal binding effect.

Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance·2025
Same author

Pragmatic communication and Theory of Mind.

Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences·2025
Same author

The Unforgettable "Mel": Pragmatic Inferences Affect How Children Acquire and Remember Word Meanings.

Developmental science·2025
Same author

Boundedness supports children's event representations.

Developmental psychology·2024
Same journal

Blurred lines or clear boundaries? Synchrony and social dominance shape domain-specific self-other processing.

Cognition·2026
Same journal

Knowability predicts curiosity and learning.

Cognition·2026
Same journal

Throwing good effort after bad: Evidence for a sunk-cost effect in cognitive effort-based decision-making.

Cognition·2026
Same journal

Cross-linguistic differences in incremental planning under uncertainty.

Cognition·2026
Same journal

Sensory attenuation scales with the strength of action-outcome coupling: A psychophysical study.

Cognition·2026
Same journal

Children's narrow learning bottleneck accelerates the emergence of statistical properties of language.

Cognition·2026
See all related articles

Children’s understanding of scalar implicatures, like inferring "not all" from "some," develops gradually. Their ability to grasp these linguistic nuances is influenced by task demands and the specific scalar terms used.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics
  • Pragmatics

Background:

  • Scalar implicatures, such as inferring 'not all' from 'some,' are crucial for pragmatic understanding.
  • Previous research suggests preschool children struggle with scalar implicatures, interpreting scalar terms literally.
  • Key questions remain regarding whether children's difficulties are universal across scalar terms or task-dependent.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how children acquire scalar implicatures across different scalar terms.
  • To determine if children's challenges with scalar implicatures stem from genuine inability or task demands.
  • To explore the developmental and theoretical implications for language acquisition and semantics.

Main Methods:

  • Experiment 1 tested 5-year-olds and adults on scalar terms: , , and .

Related Experiment Videos

  • Participants evaluated the felicity of statements in contexts where weaker terms were used for stronger meanings.
  • Experiment 2 trained children to detect infelicity and re-tested them with modified stories to assess task influence.

    • Main Results:

    • Adults consistently rejected infelicitous statements, while children rarely did.
    • Children showed a higher rejection rate for numerical scales () compared to other scales.
    • Training children to focus on task goals significantly increased their rejection rates for infelicitous statements.

    Conclusions:

    • Children's acquisition of scalar implicatures is not uniform across all scalar terms.
    • Children's ability to derive scalar implicatures is sensitive to task demands and their awareness of communicative goals.
    • Findings highlight the importance of considering both linguistic and methodological factors in child language research.