Incremental processing of telicity in Italian children

A sentence like 'Lyn has peeled the apple' triggers two types of inferences: a telicity inference that the event is telic; and a culmination inference that the event has reached its telos and has stopped. This results in the final interpretation of the sentence that Lyn has completely peeled the apple. We present an eye-tracking study to test children's ability to predict the upcoming noun (e.g., the apple) during the incremental processing of sentences like 'Look at the picture in which he/she has peeled the…' in which the predicate is telic and the verb appears in the perfective form. By means of the Visual World Paradigm, we aimed to investigate children's ability to use the lexical semantics and aspectual morphology of verbs during language processing. To test if children can predict the target (e.g., a completely peeled apple) by exploiting the lexical-semantic meaning of the verb, we contrasted the target picture with a picture of an object that cannot be peeled; to test if they can predict on the basis of the verb's perfective morphology, we compared the target with the picture of a half-peeled apple. Our results show that Italian children can anticipate the upcoming noun in both cases, providing evidence that children can exploit the morphosyntactic cue on the verb (perfective aspect) to incrementally derive the culmination inference that the telos is reached and the event is completed. We also show that the integration of aspect requires some additional time compared to the integration of the basic lexical semantics of the verb

Інституціональна структура суспільства та економічна безпека держави

У статті розглядається взаємозв’язок між інституціональною структурою суспільства та економічною безпекою держави. Виділено інститути, які мають найбільший вплив на економічну безпеку держави.The article is concerned with institutional structure and economic state security and its correlation. It focus on institutes that it have potent influence on economic state security

Reasoning about alternative forms is costly:The processing of null and overt pronouns in Italian using pupillary responses

Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and processing of a form affected by the existence of another form with a similar meaning? With a pupillary response study, we show that null and overt pronouns are processed differently. Specifically, null pronouns are found to be less costly to process than overt pronouns. We argue that this difference is caused by an additional reasoning step that is needed to process marked overt pronouns but not unmarked null pronouns. A comparison with data from Dutch, a language with overt but no null pronouns, demonstrates that Italian pronouns are processed differently from Dutch pronouns. These findings suggest that the processing of a marked form is influenced by alternative forms within the same language, making its processing costly

Representations underlying pronoun choice in Italian and English

Research has shown that speakers use fewer pronouns when the referential candidates are more similar and hence compete more strongly. Here we examined the locus of such an effect, investigating whether pronoun use is affected by the referents’ competition at a non-linguistic level only (non-linguistic competition account) or whether it is also affected by competition arising from the antecedents’ similarities (linguistic competition account) and the extent to which this depends on the type of pronoun. Speakers used Italian null pronouns and English pronouns less often (relative to full nouns) when the referential candidates compete more strongly situationally, whilst the antecedents’ semantic, grammatical or phonological similarity did not affect the rates of either pronouns, providing support for the non-linguistic competition account. However, unlike English pronouns, Italian null pronouns were unaffected by gender congruence between human referents, running counter to the gender effect for the use of non-gendered overt pronouns reported earlier. Hence, whilst both null and overt pronouns are sensitive to non-linguistic competition, what similarity affects non-linguistic competition partly depends on the type of pronouns.Output Status: Forthcoming/Available Onlin

Pragmatic Abilities in ASD children

comparing ad-hoc and scalar implicatures in children with ASD (see also Foppolo, Mazzaggio, Panzeri and Surian, Journal of Child Language, 2020

Pseudopartitives.Agreement.Foppoloetal2023

data and script files used for analyses of the paper "A group of researchers are testing pseudopartitives in Italian: notional number is not the key to the facts.

What\u27s behind some (but not all) implicatures

Several studies investigated children’s derivation of pragmatic inferences by testing different items in different languages, populations and tasks (Skordos & Papafragou, 2016). In general, pre-schoolers have difficulties in the computation of the scalar implicature (SI) related to some, while a better performance has been documented in the case of non scalar or ad hoc implicatures (AIs), even in younger kids (Horowitz, Schneider and Frank, 2017Katsos & Bishop, 2011Stiller, Goodman & Frank, 2015). Children’s difficulty has been accounted for by different hypotheses: children are more tolerant of pragmatic violations than adults (\u27tolerance account\u27, Katsos & Bishop, 2011)children do not (always) recognize what is conversationally relevant (\u27relevance account\u27, Skordos & Papafragou, 2016)children have difficulties in lexicalizing the scale and/or retrieving the lexical alternatives (\u27lexicalist account\u27, Barner et al., 2011Foppolo et al., 2012Tieu et al., 2015). Yet, the source and nature of children’s difficulty is still unknown, as well as the interplay of different factors and their impact on different inference types.Different theoretical accounts make different predictions for SIs and AIs. In principle, no difference is expected between implicature types within a pragmatic approach (like the tolerance or the relevance accounts), provided that children’s non adult-like behavior relies in a principle of pragmatic tolerance or in a failure in accessing or recognizing relevant alternatives, that would equally affect all kinds of implicature. Under lexicalist approaches, on the other hand, a difference between AIs and SIs is expected: while in the case of AIs the alternatives depend solely on context, in SIs the set of alternatives is a feature of the language that relies on the lexical representation of scales. The crucial difference is in the access to the alternatives, which depends on a linguistic representation and a lexical retrieval mechanism in the case of scalar quantifiers, while it is purely contextually determined in the case of ad hoc scales. In our study, we compared AIs and SIs by means of a Picture Selection Task modelled after Surian & Job (1987) and Stiller, Goodman & Frank (2015). Participants had to find the target (among 4 pictures) by following instructions. The tasks included 4 implicatures of each type, interspersed with control sentences. To understand the developmental factors beyond children’s performance, children were also administered tests of cognitive and linguistic development (Raven’s Progressive MatricesBVL for lexicon and morphosyntaxthe first four tasks of Wellman & Liu 2004 to test for Theory of Mind, ToM: Diverse Desires-Diverse Beliefs-Knowledge Access-Content False Belief). We tested 141 children aged 3 to 9 (75 in kindergarten: 310-60, M = 61 months66 in primary school: 610-92, M=90 months). Our findings add an additional piece to the understanding of children’s failure and success with scalar inferencing. In particular, we show that younger children succeed with AIs but have difficulties with SIs. We also found a significant role of linguistic (i.e., morpho-syntactic) abilities for both type of implicatures and a contribution of ToM: KA predicts implicatures derivation, and DB seems to play a role in SIs.The overall picture is rather puzzling: focusing on pre-schoolers, their ability to derive both types of implicatures seems to depend on common mechanisms, such as morpho-syntactic skills and the ability to recognize that another person can know something only if she has access to relevant information. Nevertheless, by controlling for task effects, we confirmed that SIs are harder than AIs. This finding is not easily explained within a pragmatic approach: if children were, in general, more logical or more tolerant than adults, they would be equally so with any kind of implicatureat the same time, if they were not sensitive to informativeness or unable to recognize relevance, they would fail with all pragmatic inferences. A lexical account instead predicts that, beyond general mechanisms common to SIs and AIs, the derivation of SIs requires one further step, that takes time to be acquired or automatized, namely: the lexicalization of the relevant scales. This might be the real source of the observed difference between these types of inferences, although further research is needed to fully capture its impact on children’s performance

Scalar and ad-hoc pragmatic inferences in children: guess which one is easier

Several studies investigated preschoolers’ ability to compute scalar and ad-hoc implicatures, but only one compared children’s performance with both kinds of implicature with the same task, a picture selection task. In Experiment 1 (N = 58, age: 42-60), we first show that the truth value judgment task, traditionally employed to investigate children’s pragmatic ability, prompts a rate of pragmatic responses comparable to the picture selection task. In Experiment 2 (N = 141, age: 38-92) we used the picture selection task to compare scalar and ad-hoc implicatures and linked the ability to derive these implicatures to some cognitive and linguistic measures. We found that four- and five-year-olds children performed better on ad-hoc than on scalar implicatures. Furthermore, we found that morphosyntactic competence was associated with success in both kinds of implicatures, while performance on mental state reasoning was positively associated with success on scalar but not ad-hoc implicatures