Experiments On The Acquisition Of Scalar Quantity Implicatures: A Systematic Review

The present study is a systematic review of experimental data on the acquisi-tion of scalar implicatures. It aims to provide an overview of available exper-imental evidence and an assessment of the various factors affecting children’s performance. This research also provides a demonstration of how useful sys-tematic reviewing can be as a methodology to analyse data in the field of ex-perimental linguistics. Only peer-reviewed, empirical articles published in English were included using the PRISMA method for systematic reviews, and the data from 44 references were analysed. The results show that children’s performance improves as they grow older, but that while above-chance per-formance is detected already at 3 years of age for ad-hoc scalar implicatures, lexical scales remain difficult for children at least until age 5. Importantly, the task used also appears to be a significant factor in children’s performance: judgment tasks are more difficult for children than tasks that do not require meta-linguistic skills.