Complex inferential processes are needed for implicature comprehension, but not for implicature production

Upon hearing “Some of Michelangelo’s sculptures are in Rome”, adults can easily generate a scalar implicature and infer that the intended meaning of the utterance corresponds to “Some but not all Michelangelo’s sculptures are in Rome”. Comprehension experiments show that preschoolers struggle with this kind of inference until at least five years of age. Surprisingly, the few studies having investigated children’s production of scalar expressions like 'some' and 'all' suggest that production is adult-like already in their third year of life. Thus, children’s production of implicatures seems to develop at least two years before their comprehension of implicatures. In this paper, we present a novel account of scalar implicature generation in the framework of Bidirectional Optimality Theory: the Asymmetry Account. We show that the production-comprehension asymmetry is predicted to emerge because the comprehension of 'some' requires the hearer to consider the speaker’s perspective, but the production of 'some' does not require the speaker to consider the hearer’s perspective. Hence, children’s comprehension of scalar expressions, but not their production of scalar expressions, is predicted to be related to their theory of mind development. Not possessing fully developed theory of mind abilities yet, children thus have difficulty in comprehending scalar expressions such as 'some' in an adult-like way. Our account also explains why variable performance is found in experimental studies testing children’s ability to generate scalar implicatures; moreover, it describes the differences between children’s and adults’ implicature generation in terms of their ability to recursively apply theory of mind; finally, it sheds new light on the question why the interpretation of numerals does not require implicatures generation

Pragmatics is not a monolithic phenomenon, and neither is theory of mind:Response to Kissine

In this commentary, we emphasize the importance of the observations presented by Kissine (2021) in his target article for our understanding of the nonmonolithic nature of pragmatics. Our first aim is to complement Kissine's argument, discussing some critical cases of linguistic processes that demonstrate the need for a finer-grained characterization of pragmatic phenomena. In addition, we report some findings that suggest that perspective taking may emerge as atypical even in autistic individuals who appear to be able to pass the standard theory-of-mind tasks. Our second aim is thus to argue that, albeit difficult to spot in experimental settings, the atypical theory-of-mind profile of low- and high-functioning autistic individuals is mirrored in their difficulties in everyday sociocommunicative interactions. Moreover, we claim that subtle differences in perspective-taking abilities may explain the highly heterogeneous linguistic profile of autistic individuals. Ultimately, with this commentary we wish to highlight the need for an increased appreciation of the role of perspective taking in typical and atypical language acquisition. This is crucial to our understanding of the nature of language acquisition, and can shed more light on the interaction between language and other aspects of human cognition

Are second language speakers more pragmatically tolerant? Explaining the differences in scalar implicature generation between L2 and L1

Children’s difficulties with Scalar Implicature (SI) generation have been argued to stem from their tolerance towards pragmatic violations rather than from issues with the inferential process per se (Katsos & Bishop 2011). Ternary judgment tasks have been used to support this view. In these tasks, when presented with underinformative sentences, children, as well as adults, choose an intermediate option between acceptance and rejection, thus demonstrating sensitivity to underinformativeness. Some recent studies show that adult second language (L2) speakers also generate SIs at lower rates. In this work, we investigated whether pragmatic tolerance, possibly emerging because of limited language exposure, could explain the difference between (adult) L2 and L1 speakers. Contrary to our expectations, neither our L1 control group nor our L2 groups (L2 High and L2 Low Proficiency) consistently selected the intermediate option when judging underinformative sentences. However, the L2 Low Proficiency group showed a significantly higher tendency to accept underinformative sentences compared to the L1 group. Hence, our results do not support the hypothesis that L2 speakers are more pragmatically tolerant than L1 speakers. However, our findings show that, despite the adoption of a ternary judgment task, low-proficient L2 speakers display a strong tendency to interpret underinformative sentences literally. We argue that this tendency in the L2 can be attributed to the increased cognitive effort involved in SI generation