Previous studies have demonstrated that unlike adults,young children have difficulty computing scalar implicatures.Two distinct accounts have been proposed for this phenomenon.On one account,as computing scalar impliactures involves three complicated steps,including lexical retrieval,lexical replace-ment and negation of the statement with the stronger alternative,young children's limited working memo-ry is the source of their failure to compute scalar implicatures.On an alternative account,children's re-stricted lexicon causes their inability to implement lexical replacement,which results in their failure of computing scalar implicatures.Against this background,the present study attempts to probe the underly-ing mechanism of preschool Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of scalar implicatures.The purpose is to figure out why children often fail to compute scalar implicatures.Using a picture verification task,we conducted two experiments.Experiment 1 investigated whether preschool Mandarin-speaking children can compute scalar implicatures triggered by yixie"some"when the stronger alternative suoyou"all"is not provided in the experimental contexts.Experiment 2 examined whether children can compute scalar impli-catures triggered by yixie"some"when the stronger alternative suoyou"all"is explicitly provided in the experimental contexts.The main findings were as follows.In Experiment 1,the child participants accepted the test sentences 83％of the time,and adults did so 20％of the time.In Experiment 2,the children ac-cepted the test sentences 67％of the time,and adults did so 15％of the time.Taken together,the findings suggest that contextually introduced stronger alternatives facilitate young children's computation of scalar implicatures.Therefore,our findings appear to support the account that the restricted lexicon is the source of young children's failure of computing scalar implicatures.Moreover,the difference between children's and adults'ability of computing scalar implicatures tends to support the Continuity Assumption.
scalar implicaturelanguage acquisitionthe interface between semantics and pragmaticspre-school Mandarin-speaking children
万方数据
维普
