2 research outputs found
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Conversational expectations account for apparent limits on theory of mind use
Theory of mind is a powerful cognitive ability: by the ageof six, people are capable of accurately reasoning about oth-ers’ beliefs and desires. An influential series of language un-derstanding experiments by Keysar and colleagues, however,showed that adults systematically failed to take a speaker’sbeliefs into account, revealing limitations on theory of mind.In this paper we argue that these apparent failures are in factsuccesses. Through a minimal pair of replications comparingscripted vs. unscripted speakers, we show that critical utter-ances used by Keysar and colleagues are uncooperative: theyare less informative than what a speaker would actually pro-duce in that situation. When we allow participants to naturallyinteract, we find that listener expectations are justified and er-rors are reduced. This ironically shows that apparent failuresof theory of mind are in fact attributable to sophisticated ex-pectations about speaker behavior—that is, to theory of mind
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Children’s development of Quantity, Relevance and Manner implicature understanding and the role of the speaker’s epistemic state
In learning language, children have to acquire not only words and constructions, but also the ability to make inferences about a speaker’s intended meaning. For instance, if in answer to the question, ‘what did you put in the bag?’, the speaker says, ‘I put in a book’, then the hearer infers that the speaker put in only a book, by assuming that the speaker is informative. On a Gricean approach to pragmatics, this implicated meaning – a quantity implicature – involves reasoning about the speaker’s epistemic state. This thesis examines children’s development of implicature understanding. It seeks to address the question of what the relationship is in development between quantity, relevance and manner implicatures; whether word learning by exclusion is a pragmatic forerunner to implicature, or based on a lexical heuristic; and whether reasoning about the speaker’s epistemic state is part of children’s pragmatic competence.
This thesis contributes to research in experimental and developmental pragmatics by broadening the focus of investigation to include different types of implicatures, the relationship between them, and the contribution of other aspects of children’s development, including structural language knowledge. It makes the novel comparison of word learning by exclusion with a clearly pragmatic skill – implicatures – and opens an investigation of manner implicatures in development. It also presents new findings suggesting that children’s early competence with quantity implicatures in simple communicative situations belies their ongoing development in more complex ones, particularly where the speaker’s epistemic state is at stake.
I present a series of experiments based on a sentence-to-picture-matching task, with children aged 3 to 7 years. In the first study, I identify a developmental trajectory whereby word learning by exclusion inferences emerge first, followed by ad hoc quantity and relevance, and finally scalar quantity inferences, which reflects their increasing complexity in a Gricean model. Then, I explore cognitive and environmental factors that might be associated with children’s pragmatic skills, and show that structural language knowledge – and, associated with it, socioeconomic status – is a main predictor of their implicature understanding. In the second study, I lay out some predictions for the development of manner implicatures, find similar patterns of understanding in children and adults, and highlight the particular challenges of studying manner implicatures experimentally. Finally, I focus on children’s ability to take into account the speaker’s epistemic state in pragmatic inferencing. While adults do not derive a quantity implicature appropriately when the speaker is ignorant, children tend to persist in deriving implicatures regardless of speaker ignorance, suggesting a continuing challenge of integrating contextual with linguistic information in utterance interpretation.ESRC studentshi