Lexical alternatives improve 5-year-olds’ ability to compute scalar implicatures

The term scalar comes from the idea that linguistic terms like some and all form ordered sets of alternatives based on informational strength, typically described as scales. In our case, the term some can be thought of as belonging to the following scale < some, ..., most, all> (see Horn, 1972). An account of how scalar implicatures are derived was described by Paul Grice (1975). He suggested that communication is a co-operative effort largely governed by rational expectations (‘Maxims’) about how a conversation should proceed. According to Grice’s maxims, other things being equal, communicators are expected to offer contributions which are truthful, informative, relevant and appropriate to the goals of the conversation. These expectations about rational conversational conduct guide the inferences which hearers usually entertain when interpreting utterances. When these expectations seem to be violated, the assumption that this was done on purpose creates a variety of effects. According to Grice’s theory, in producing (1a), the speaker violated the maxim of Quantity (or informativeness):