Accessing the unsaid: The role of scalar alternatives in children’s pragmatic inference

When faced with a sentence like, “Some of the toys are on the table”,adults, but not preschoolers, compute a scalar implicature, taking thesentence to imply that not all the toys are on the table. This paperexplores the hypothesis that children fail to compute scalar implicaturesbecause they lack knowledge of relevant scalar alternatives to words like“some”. Four-year-olds were shown pictures in which three out of threeobjects fit a description (e.g., three animals reading), and were asked toevaluate statements that relied on context-independent alternatives (e.g.,knowing that all is an alternative to some for the utterance “Some of theanimals are reading”) or contextual alternatives (e.g., knowing that theset of all three visible animals is an alternative to a set of two for theutterance “Only the cat and the dog are reading”). Children failed toreject the false statements containing context-independent scales even whenthe word only was used (e.g., only some), but correctly rejected equivalentstatements containing contextual alternatives (e.g., only the cat and dog).These results support the hypothesis that children’s difficulties withscalar implicature are due to a failure to generate relevant alternativesfor specific scales. Consequences for number word learning are alsodiscussed.