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Pragmatic Development in First Language Acquisition
Edited by Danielle Matthews
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 10] 2014
► pp. 183–198

Scalar Implicature

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Children younger than 5½ years of age do not draw inferences based on the quantity of information expressed (e.g. the inference that ‘some of the animals are sleeping’ implies ‘not all the animals are sleeping’) at the rates that adults do. Explanations of this difficulty include limited processing resources, shallow lexical entries and lack of adult-like expectations of informativeness. I review experimental evidence and theoretical accounts of the development of the ability to draw these inferences with the aim (a) to highlight links between potentially related phenomena (such as these inferences and word learning), and (b) to outline a novel account which makes predictions about the underlying mechanisms and age of acquisition of these inferences.

Published online: 26 June 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.10.11kat
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Schulze, Cornelia, Gerlind Grosse & Markus Spreer
2018. Erwerb pragmatischer Fähigkeiten und mögliche Störungen (im Kindesalter). In Handbuch Pragmatik, ► pp. 177 ff. DOI logo
Zhang, Jun & Yan Wu
2023. Epistemic reasoning in pragmatic inferencing by non-native speakers: The case of scalar implicatures. Second Language Research 39:3 ► pp. 697 ff. DOI logo

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