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How to test for pragmatic competence in the case of informativeness| old_uid | 9011 |
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| title | How to test for pragmatic competence in the case of informativeness |
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| start_date | 2010/06/29 |
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| schedule | 11h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | Salle R.N.02 |
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| summary | A growing body of developmental research documents that children below the age of 5 fail to derive quantity implicatures (e.g. the inference from ‘some of the books are red’ to ‘not all the books are red’). In this course I review several of the experimental paradigms that have been used to evaluate children’s competence and highlight that they do not take into account some key aspects of this inference, namely that it is defeasible and it is not part of truth-conditional content. These properties are particularly important when the experimental paradigm requires participants to make a binary judgment (correct or incorrect; true or false; right or wrong) on the felicity of the critical utterances: participants who notice the pragmatic infelicity may nevertheless not consider it grave enough to warrant the rejection of the utterance. I discuss recent experimental work which shows that children are indeed able to derive quantity implicatures when we use paradigms that take these aspects into account. Overall I propose that some of the major experimental methodologies used to study the acquisition of semantic and syntactic competence should not be copied over to the study of pragmatic competence without significant modifications. |
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| responsibles | <not specified> |
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