Publications

Publication details [#63656]

Hollebrandse, Bart, Napoleon Katsos and Alma Veenstra. 2017. Why some children accept under-informative utterances. Lack of competence or Pragmatic Tolerance? Pragmatics & Cognition 24 (2) : 297–313.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/pc

Annotation

Binary judgement on under-informative utterances (e.g. Some horses jumped over the fence, when all horses did) is the most widely used methodology to test children’s ability to generate implicatures. Accepting under-informative utterances is considered a failure to generate implicatures. This paper presents off-line and reaction time evidence for the Pragmatic Tolerance Hypothesis, according to which some children who accept under-informative utterances are in fact competent with implicature but do not consider pragmatic violations grave enough to reject the critical utterance. Seventy-five Dutch-speaking four to nine-year-olds completed a binary (Experiment A) and a ternary judgement task (Experiment B). Half of the children who accepted an utterance in Experiment A penalised it in Experiment B. Reaction times revealed that these children experienced a slow-down in the critical utterances in Experiment A, suggesting that they detected the pragmatic violation even though they did not reject it. This paper proposes that binary judgement tasks systematically underestimate children’s competence with pragmatics.