Development of Scalar Implicatures and the Indefinite Article A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO ...

130 Pages·2012·2.63 MB·English

by  Kaitlin R Johnson

Development of Scalar Implicatures and the Indefinite Article

A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
BY

Kaitlin Rose Johnson

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Jeanette K. Gundel, Ph.D. and Maria D. Sera, Ph.D., Advisers

January 2012
© Kaitlin Rose Johnson 2012
Acknowledgements
I am incredibly grateful for the inspiration, support, motivation, and patience of
my two advisors, Jeanette Gundel and Maria Sera. You have both forever changed the
way I think of language, cognition, and research.
Thanks to my committee members, Brian Reese and Apostolos Georgopoulos for
their time, encouragement, and helpful suggestions. Thank you to everyone who
provided feedback during all stages of my research, especially the members of Maria
Sera’s lab. Thank you to all the staff, current and former, of the Institute of Linguistics
and the Institute of Child Development for keeping your respective ships afloat. Thank
you to Sarah Brown for all of your help in data collection. Thank you to Donna Goodin
for helping me stay sane and Shannon Halkyard for the statistics help.
The years I have spent in graduate school have been life altering in ways I never
could have imagined and I could not have persevered without the friends I made along
the way, especially Sara Schmelzer Loss, Ellen Lucast, Eden Kaiser, Paula Chesley, and
Mark Wicklund. Thank you.
Thanks to my dear friend, former roommate, and almost-cousin, Jenny Leraas, for
making me laugh, lending me clothes, keeping me well-fed, and always joining me on the
dance floor.
Thank you to my husband, Chris Warren, for your patience and support. I hope
you never stop challenging me. Finally, thank you to my parents, Penelope Ray and
Mark Johnson, for nurturing my curiosity from the very beginning.
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Dedication

To Chris, with the promise to never write another one.

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Abstract
Previous research in pragmatic development suggests that children as old as ten
often fail to make pragmatic inferences associated with quantifiers like some and modal
verbs like might; instead they initially interpret these forms in terms of their logical
meanings (i.e. some is compatible with all) (Chierchia et al., 2001; Noveck, 2001). This
dissertation examines children’s acquisition of pragmatic inferences associated with the
definite and indefinite articles the and a (Gundel et al., 1993). In a series of three
experiments, pragmatic comprehension of these forms is assessed in children and adults
through two tasks: an evaluation-based comprehension task similar to tasks used by
previous researchers (Puppet Task) as well as an action-based task (Action Task).
The results of Experiment 1 indicate that, contrary to previous research with other
scalar terms, by age 7 children overwhelmingly prefer the pragmatic interpretation of a.
Experiment 1 also revealed that some 5-year-olds show non-adult-like behavior with
respect to the definite article the—selecting a not-previously-mentioned object upon
hearing the and accepting the puppet’s actions when he did the same. Experiment 2 tests,
and ultimately rejects, the hypothesis that the 5-year-olds’ behavior in response to the in
the previous experiment was due to processing difficulties as the result of their having a
distributed attention. Experiment 3 attempts to arbitrate between two other explanations
for the 5-year-olds’ behavior in response to the; young children are either 1) less sensitive
than adults and older children to the Relevance-based pragmatic inferences sometimes
associated with the or 2) prone to favor new objects (in the Action Task) and agreeing
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with the puppet (in the Puppet Task) as opposed to attending to the linguistic input in
each trial. The results of the Action Task in Experiment 3 lend support to the latter
hypothesis; the results of the Puppet Task, however, support the former, suggesting that
the Puppet Task was problematic and potentially calling into question some findings from
previous research using evaluation-based tasks as a means of evaluating comprehension.

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Table of Contents
List of Tables ..................................................................................................................viii
List of Figures ...................................................................................................................ix
Chapter 1 Introduction.....................................................................................................1
Chapter 2 Referring Expressions and Their Use..............................................................5
2.1 Various Theories of Referring Expressions...........................................................5
2.2 The Givenness Hierarchy.....................................................................................11
2.3 The Givenness Hierarchy and Pragmatic Principles............................................16
2.3.1 Interaction with Grice’s Maxim of Quantity....................................18
2.3.2 Interaction with Relevance Theory...................................................22
2.4 What Do Speakers and Addressees Need to Know?...........................................24
Chapter 3 Referring Expressions, Pragmatics, and Scalar Implicatures in Development.28
3.1 Children Use Referring Expressions Appropriately in Natural Conversation.....29
3.2 Children Sometimes “Overuse” Referring Expressions......................................34
3.3 Children’s Understanding of Pragmatic Norms...................................................36
3.4 Experimental Studies of Children’s Use of Referring Expressions.....................44
3.5 Summary and Motivation for Experiment 1........................................................48
Chapter 4 Experiment 1.................................................................................................52
4.1 Participants...........................................................................................................52
4.2 Design..................................................................................................................53
4.3 Tasks....................................................................................................................54
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4.3.1 Action Task.......................................................................................54
4.3.2 Puppet Task.......................................................................................58
4.4 Results..................................................................................................................61
4.4.1 Action Task.......................................................................................61
4.4.2 Puppet Task.......................................................................................63
4.5 Discussion............................................................................................................68
Chapter 5 Experiments 2 and 3......................................................................................76
5.1 Experiment 2........................................................................................................76
5.1.1 Participants........................................................................................76
5.1.2 Design and Tasks..............................................................................77
5.1.3 Results...............................................................................................78
5.1.4 Discussion.........................................................................................81
5.2 Experiment 3........................................................................................................83
5.2.1 Participants........................................................................................84
5.2.2 Design and Tasks..............................................................................84
5.2.3 Results...............................................................................................87
5.2.4 Discussion.........................................................................................89
Chapter 6 Conclusion.....................................................................................................92
6.1 A Review of the Findings from this Research.....................................................92
6.2 Is There Evidence That 5-year-olds Do Not Recognize Scalar Implicatures with
the Indefinite Article?.......................................................................................95
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6.3 Is There Evidence That 5-year-olds Do Not Make the Same Pragmatic Inferences
as Adults?..........................................................................................................96
6.4 Can These Results Be Explained with Present Theoretical Models?..................97
Limitations of the Present Research.............................................................................99
6.5 Future Directions...............................................................................................101
6.5.1 Importance of the Action Task.......................................................101
6.5.2 Human versus Computer Interaction?............................................104
6.5.3 Production versus Comprehension.................................................107
6.5.4 Unknown Factors............................................................................108
6.6 Concluding Remarks..........................................................................................111
References.......................................................................................................................112
Appendix A: Warm-up exercises used in Experiments 1 and 2 to elicit a and the......117
Appendix B: Warm-up exercises used in Experiment 3 to elicit it..............................119

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List of Tables
Table 1: Sample trials for the action task.......................................................................58
Table 2: Conditions for Puppet Task..............................................................................60
Table 3: Action task means and standard deviations (in parentheses) of correct
responses by age...............................................................................................62
Table 4: Scoring Method for Puppet Task.....................................................................64
Table 5: Puppet task means and standard deviations (in parentheses) of responses by
age....................................................................................................................65
Table 6: Responses vs. chance by participants on the Puppet Task...............................66
Table 7: Means and standard deviations (in parentheses) of responses by 5-year-olds in
the Action Task by experiment........................................................................79
Table 8: Puppet task: Means and standard deviations (in parentheses) of responses of 5-
year-olds by experiment...................................................................................80
Table 9: Sample trials for the action task in experiment 3.............................................85
Table 10: Sample trials for the Puppet Task from Experiment 3.....................................86
Table 11: Means and standard deviations (in parentheses) of correct responses by 5-year-
olds in the Action Task by experiment............................................................87
Table 12: Puppet Task: Means and standard deviations (in parentheses) of responses of
5-year-olds by experiment...............................................................................88

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