CNL Lunch

Andrea Gualmini

Why would any adult do what some child does?

Thursday February 15th, 12:30pm, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

The interpretation of logical words across natural languages is consistently influenced by pragmatic norms; for example, sentences containing the disjunction or are highly dispreferred whenever the corresponding statement containing and could be used. Experimental investigations have uncovered some differences in children's and adults' adherence to pragmatic norms. In particular, adult speakers always reject sentences of the form A or B in contexts in which both A and B are true, whereas young children accept such sentences. In this talk, I present the results of two experiments investigating adult's adherence to pragmatic norms in a linguistic context that reverses the information strength associated with sentences containing and and or, namely the quantified expression None of the Ns. To illustrate, consider the sentences in (1-2) as description of a scenario in which three monkeys have been looking for a Frisbee and a banana, but they could not find either one.

(1) None of the monkeys found the Frisbee or the banana
(2) None of the monkeys found the Frisbee and the banana

The experimental results show that in such context, adult speakers of English know that (1) is more informative than (2), although this does not lead adults to reject (2). These results show that adults accept sentences even if a more informative statement is available, in a way that closely resembles children's behavior documented by previous research.