Over-informative children: Production/comprehension asymmetry or tolerance to pragmatic violations?

Gricean Brainwaves: Brain Responses to Pragmatic Violations in Dialogues

During conversation, speakers and listeners act on certain basic assumptions, which enable them to communicate swiftly and seemingly effortlessly (Grice, 1975). The speaker, for instance, is supposed to say no more, but also no less than is necessary in a given conversational context (Maxim of Quantity). The present study looks at how language users react when this pragmatic assumption is viola...

Children and Pragmatic Implicatures: A Test of the Pragmatic Tolerance Hypothesis with Different Tasks

The pragmatic tolerance hypothesis (Katsos & Smith, 2010) was originated to explain the difference between children and adults concerning scalar implicatures. They introduced the use of a Likert-scale to test this hypothesis. We conducted a study with a within subjects design in which we compare children‟s binary and scalar responses to the same underinformative sentences. We also used two sepa...

Talker-Specific Generalization of Pragmatic Inferences based on Under- and Over-Informative Prenominal Adjective Use

According to Grice's (1975) Maxim of Quantity, rational talkers formulate their utterances to be as economical as possible while conveying all necessary information. Naturally produced referential expressions, however, often contain more or less information than what is predicted to be optimal given a rational speaker model. How do listeners cope with these variations in the linguistic input? W...

Speaker-specific pragmatic generalizations based on under- vs. over-informative utterances

Referring expressions and structural language abilities in children with specific language impairment: A pragmatic tolerance account.

Specific language impairment (SLI) has traditionally been characterized as a deficit of structural language (specifically grammar), with relative strengths in pragmatics. In this study, comprehensive assessment of production, comprehension, and metalinguistic judgment of referring expressions revealed that children with SLI have weaknesses in both structural and pragmatic language skills relati...