Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children succeed at context-specific ad hoc implicatures early, but struggle with generalized scalar implicatures until much later. This developmental trajectory is often explained by children's failure to access relevant alternatives for scalar implicatures. We tested this hypothesis by investigating scalar implicatures involving concrete nouns (superordinate – basic-level – subordinate nouns), termed hierarchical implicatures (HI). To create scenarios where a speaker can felicitously forgo a more informative term, we also manipulated speaker knowledge of different nouns. We found that 4- to 5-year-old children computed HI with superordinates (contrasted with basic-level nouns) only in certain contexts, and did not compute HI with basic-level nouns (contrasted with subordinates). Meanwhile, adults computed HI in both cases. Our findings suggested that difficulties accessing relevant alternatives might not be the main reason for children's late success in computing generalized scalar implicatures. Other factors, such as the ability to represent asymmetric relations between lexical terms, might play a bigger role.