Balancing the (Horn) Scale: Explaining the Production-Comprehension Asymmetry for Scalar Implicatures

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dc.contributor.authorMognon, Irene
dc.contributor.authorSprenger, Simone
dc.contributor.authorKuijper, Sanne
dc.contributor.authorHendriks, Petra
dc.date2023-05-18T00:53:36.000
dc.date.accessioned2023-05-23T00:43:25Z
dc.date.available2021-07-09T00:00:00Z
dc.date.issued2021-07-09
dc.date.submitted2021-07-09T14:31:13-07:00
dc.description.abstractPreschoolers struggle with Scalar Implicature (SI) generation, showing difficulties in interpreting the scalar element “some” with its upper-bounded meaning “some but not all”. Strikingly, despite the fact that the comprehension of “some” is not adult-like until at least 5 years of age, recent corpus data suggest that children, in production, can use “some” as “not all” already in their third year of life. In this paper, we propose the Asymmetry Account, an account of SI generation formulated in the framework of Bidirectional Optimality Theory (Bi-OT). By taking Bi-OT as a model of language use, we show that the comprehension of “some” requires hearers’ to consider the speaker’s perspective, but not vice versa: to produce “some” with its upper-bounded meaning no mentalizing about other perspectives is needed. In light of this, we predict that the comprehension of weak scalar elements such as “some” is cognitively more demanding than their production and argue that children’s difficulty with the “some”-implicature is to be related to children’s developing of cognitive abilities, in particular, Theory of Mind.
dc.identifier.urihttps://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/45315
dc.legacy.articleid2140
dc.legacy.fulltexturlhttps://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2140&context=pwpl&unstamped=1
dc.source.issue19
dc.source.journalUniversity of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics
dc.source.peerreviewedtrue
dc.source.statuspublished
dc.titleBalancing the (Horn) Scale: Explaining the Production-Comprehension Asymmetry for Scalar Implicatures
dc.title.alternativeHorn Scale Asymmetry
dc.typeWorking Paper
digcom.contributor.authorMognon, Irene
digcom.contributor.authorSprenger, Simone
digcom.contributor.authorKuijper, Sanne
digcom.contributor.authorHendriks, Petra
digcom.date.embargo2021-07-09T00:00:00-07:00
digcom.identifierpwpl/vol27/iss1/19
digcom.identifier.contextkey23750120
digcom.identifier.submissionpathpwpl/vol27/iss1/19
digcom.typeworkingpaper
dspace.entity.typePublication
relation.isJournalIssueOfPublication25fa28ad-f935-4dea-aa0a-13c75d81357e
relation.isJournalIssueOfPublication.latestForDiscovery25fa28ad-f935-4dea-aa0a-13c75d81357e
relation.isJournalOfPublication132fd3ed-455d-4af6-9c2c-a7ed87eee405
upenn.schoolDepartmentCenterUniversity of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics
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