title: Show me the pragmatic contribution: a developmental investigation of contrastive inference.
abstract: An utterance such as 'Show me the large rabbit' potentially generates a contrastive inference, i.e., the article the and the adjective large allow listeners to pragmatically infer the existence of other entities having the same noun (e.g. a small rabbit). The primary way to measure children's ability to carry out this pragmatic inference has been through tasks that measure infelicity detection. We argue that such studies are not as revealing as one might assume because they force children to adopt a metalinguistic stance and they consider infelicity detection as tantamount to contrastive inference-making. To address these concerns, we develop a game-like situation in which all utterances remain felicitous. Moreover, we make a distinction between responses that are revealing of a pragmatic interpretation and responses that are revealing of a reliance on the utterance's linguistically encoded meaning (i.e., a lack of contrastive inference). Three experiments with seven-year-olds, ten-year-olds, and adults show that pragmatic interpretations do not emerge among seven-year-olds, that ten-year-olds do not show adult-like performance, and that adults are not at ceiling. We conclude that contrastive inference-making is an effortful process and that the ability to detect such gains-in-information through language increases with age.
authors.affiliation: Escuela de Psicología,Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
authors.forename: Edmundo
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Kronmüller
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire sur le Langage, le Cerveau et la Cognition (L2C2, UMR5230),Centre de recherche français à Jérusalem (CRFJ).
authors.forename: Tiffany
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Morisseau
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire sur le Langage, le Cerveau et la Cognition (L2C2, UMR5230),Centre de recherche français à Jérusalem (CRFJ).
authors.forename: Ira A
authors.initials: IA
authors.lastname: Noveck
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D003210:Concept Formation; D006801:Humans; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D055815:Young Adult