Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent experimental evidence suggests that adults incorporatespeaker knowledge into the derivation of pragmaticimplicatures. Developmental studies report that 5-year-oldchildren also succeed in taking speaker knowledge intoaccount in implicature computation, but 4-year-olds fail. Thepresent study investigated the pragmatic competence of 4-year-olds, specifically the ability to incorporate speakerknowledge into the derivation of ad hoc scalar implicatures.Using a simple paradigm inspired by referentialcommunication, we found that 4- year-olds are able toincorporate speaker knowledge into implicature derivation.These results have implications for our understanding of thelinguistic, pragmatic, and epistemic abilities of youngchildren.