Publications

This chapter presents two experimental studies carried out to test five year-olds’ and adults’ comprehension of quantification and of grammatical aspect in Iberian Spanish in conditions which require the generation of a scalar implicature (pragmatic conditions) and in conditions that do not require it (semantic conditions). Results confirmed that children’s performance is less adult-like in conditions which require pragmatic reasoning than in conditions that involve semantic knowledge (Noveck, 2004). Within the variability observed among the children in their performance in the two tasks, three different profiles can be distinguished: 1) children who derived implicatures with both quantification and aspect, 2) those who could only derive implicatures with one type of scale and 3) those who did not derive an implicature with any of the two types of scales analyzed. These results point towards a gradual acquisition of scalar implicatures which depends on the alternatives of a certain scale available to the child, in line with Barner et al. (2011).