Semantic meaning and pragmatic interpretation in 5-year-olds: Evidence from real-time spoken language comprehension.

Recent research on children's inferencing has found that while adults typically adopt the pragmatic interpretation of some (implying not all), five-to nine-year-olds often prefer the semantic interpretation of the quantifier (meaning possibly all).Do these failures reflect a breakdown of pragmatic competence or the metalinguistic demands of prior tasks?In three experiments, we used the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm to elicit an implicit measure of adult's and children's abilities to generate scalar implicatures.While adults' eye-movements indicated that they had interpreted some with the pragmatic inference, children's looks suggest that they persistently interpreted some as compatible with all (Experiment 1).Nevertheless, both adults and children were able to quickly reject competitors that were inconsistent with the semantics of some, confirming the sensitivity of the paradigm (Experiment 2).Finally, adults, but not children, successfully distinguished between situations that violated the scalar implicature and ones that did not (Experiment 3).These data demonstrate that children interpret quantifiers based on their semantic content and fail to generate scalar implicatures during online language comprehension.