Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Despite their considerable communicative abilities, youngchildren often have difficulty interpreting complex linguisticstructures in context. Two examples of this phenomenon arenegation and pragmatic implicature, both of which pose some-times surprising difficulties for preschoolers. Both of thesestructures require children to resist a more salient alternativeinterpretation; since executive function abilities develop ex-tensively during childhood, perhaps failures are due to prob-lems in inhibition. To test this hypothesis, we designed tasksto measure inhibitory control, negation, and implicature com-prehension in children and adults. Using standard analyses aswell as drift diffusion models, we found different patterns ofprocessing on all three tasks, and no support for the hypothesisthat inhibitory control per se is playing a role in either adults’or children’s negation or implicature processing. Instead, ouranalyses reveal qualitatively different developmental trajecto-ries, suggesting task-specific factors driving these changes.