The logical syntax of number words: Theory, acquisition and processing

Children's Interpretations of Numerically Quantified Expression Ambiguities: Evidence from Quantified Noun Phrases and Bare Cardinals

Understanding how children comprehend text by forming links between sentences has been the focus of research for decades. Such research has consistently shown that children use anaphors and resolve ambiguities in a different manner than adults. The present study examined a less-studied anaphoric reference that arises when two numerically quantified expressions (e.g., "three cats… two cats…") are used in the text. Focusing on 249 six- to eight-year-old children and 50 adults for comparison, the study employed a picture selection task across six experiments to assess interpretative preferences in ambiguous and unambiguous discourses containing numerically quantified expressions. The findings indicate a pronounced difference in interpretative strategies: unlike adults, who predominantly adopted an anaphoric subset reading, children showed a consistent preference for the non-anaphoric reading, even in contexts explicitly disambiguated towards this interpretation. This preference persisted across various experimental manipulations, highlighting challenges in text integration and comprehension among children. Contributing to the developmental trajectory of language comprehension, this study underscores the complexity of cognitive development and linguistic interpretation, revealing significant developmental differences in processing numerically quantified expressions and anaphoric references within discourse.

Should I say that? An experimental investigation of the norm of assertion

Assertions are our standard communicative devices for sharing and acquiring information. Recent studies seemingly provide converging evidence that assertions are subject to a factive norm: you are entitled to make an assertion only if it is true. However, these studies assume that we can treat participants' judgements about what an agent 'should say' as evidence of their intuitions about assertability. This paper argues that this assumption is incorrect, so the conclusions drawn in the aforementioned studies are unwarranted. We provide evidence that most people do not interpret statements about what one 'should say' as statements about assertability, but rather as statements about what is in the agent's interest to do. Measures for prompting the intended reading of the test question are identified, and their efficacy is tested. We found that when these measures are implemented, people's judgements consistently and overwhelmingly align with non-factive accounts of assertion.

The Understanding of Scalar Implicatures in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Dichotomized Responses to Violations of Informativeness

This study investigated the understanding of underinformative sentences like "Some elephants have trunks" by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The scalar term 'some' can be interpreted pragmatically, 'Not all elephants have trunks,' or logically, 'Some and possibly all elephants have trunks.' Literature indicates that adults with ASD show no real difficulty in interpreting scalar implicatures, i.e., they often interpret them pragmatically, as controls do. This contrasts with the traditional claim of difficulties of people with ASD in other pragmatic domains, and is more in line with the idea that pragmatic problems are not universal. The aim of this study was to: (a) gain insight in the ability of children with ASD to derive scalar implicatures, and (b) do this by assessing not only sensitivity to underinformativeness, but also different degrees of tolerance to violations of informativeness. We employed a classic statement-evaluation task, presenting optimal, logical false, and underinformative utterances. In Experiment 1, children had to express their judgment on a binary option 'I agree' vs. 'I disagree.' In Experiment 2, a ternary middle answer option 'I agree a bit' was also available. Sixty-six Flemish-speaking 10-year-old children were tested: 22 children with ASD, an IQ-matched group, and an age-matched group. In the binary judgment task, the ASD group gave more pragmatic answers than the other groups, which was significant in the mixed effects logistic regression analysis, although not in the non-parametric analysis. In the ternary judgment task, the children with ASD showed a dichotomized attitude toward the speaker's meaning, by tending to either fully agree or fully disagree with underinformative statements, in contrast with TD children, who preferred the middle option. Remarkably, the IQ-matched group exhibited the same pattern of results as the ASD group. Thanks to a fine-grained measure such as the ternary judgment task, this study highlighted a neglected aspect of the pragmatic profile of ASD, whose struggle with social communication seems to affect also the domain of informativeness. We discuss the implications of the dichotomized reaction toward violations of informativeness in terms of the potential role of ASD and of cognitive and verbal abilities.

All Together Now: Disentangling Semantics and Pragmatics with Together in Child and Adult Language

The way in which an event is packaged linguistically can be informative about the number of participants in the event and the nature of their participation. At times, however, a sentence is ambiguous, and pragmatic information weighs in to favor one interpretation over another. Whereas adults may readily know how to pick up on such cues to meaning, children - who are generally naïve to such pragmatic nuances - may diverge and access a broader range of interpretations, or one disfavored by adults. A number of cases come to us from a now well-established body of research on scalar implicatures and scopal ambiguity. Here, we complement this previous work with a previously uninvestigated example of the semantic-pragmatic divide in language development arising from the interpretation of sentences with pluralities and together. Sentences such as Two boys lifted a block (together) allow for either a Collective or a Distributive interpretation (one pushing event vs. two spatiotemporally coordinated events). We show experimentally that children allow both interpretations in sentences with together, whereas adults rule out the Distributive interpretation without further contextual motivation. However, children appear to be guided by their semantics in the readings they access, since they do not allow readings that are semantically barred. We argue that they are unaware of the pragmatic information adults have at their fingertips, such as the conversational implicatures arising from the presence of a modifier, the probability of its occurrence being used to signal a particular interpretation among a set of alternatives, and knowledge of the possible lexical alternatives.

The Role of Cardinality in the Interpretation of Measurement Expressions

The purpose of this brief article is to investigate four-year-olds' interpretation of attributive measure phrases (MPs), such as 3-pound, and the role of cardinality in mediating children's responses. In two experiments, I demonstrate that children at this age are starting to recognize that such MPs refer to a property of an individual, such as weight per unit (rather than the weight of an entire collection). Accordingly, they distinguish between attributive and pseudopartitive MPs. However, when the opportunity presents itself to treat the number word as referring to the cardinality of a set, some children succumb to this pressure, deviating from adult-like responses. I argue that the fundamental aspect of number word meaning that children take the first few years of life to master - that number words denote exact cardinality of a set of discrete objects - is precisely the aspect they must overcome when interpreting these MPs. However, the evidence shows that four-year-olds are well on their way to doing so.

Collectivity, Distributivity, and the Interpretation of Plural Numerical Expressions in Child and Adult Language

Sentences containing plural numerical expressions (e.g., two boys) can give rise to two interpretations (collective and distributive), arising from the fact that their representation admits of a part-whole structure. We present the results of a series of experiments designed to explore children's understanding of this distinction and its implications for the acquisition of linguistic expressions with number words. We show that preschoolers access both interpretations, indicating that they have the requisite linguistic and conceptual machinery to generate the corresponding representations. Furthermore, they can shift their interpretation in response to structural and lexical manipulations. However, they are not fully adult-like: unlike adults, they are drawn to the distributive interpretation, and are not yet aware of the lexical semantics of each and together, which should favor one or another interpretation. This research bridges a gap between a well-established body of work in cognitive psychology on the acquisition of number words and more recent work investigating children's knowledge of the syntactic and semantic properties of sentences featuring numerical expressions.