Linguistic communication relies on pragmatic implicatures such as the inference that if “some students passed the test,” not all did. Yet young children perform poorly on tests of implicature, especially scalar implicatures using “some” and “all,” until quite late in development. We investigate the origins of scalar implicature using tasks in which the scale arises from real-world context rathe...

Pragmatic competence i.e., the ability to understand intended meaning is a long standing challenge in communication. This work proposes a computational framework for pragmatic inference that is based on reasoning by taking into account the realistic assumption that any communication could be deceptive and that intentions can be reflected in language use. Pragmatic inference is examined under th...

This paper examines the prosodic organization of L2 Japanese produced by L1 Swedish at the beginner level. Japanese and Swedish have been well studied for their prosodic structures and some well-defined prosodic phrases have been proposed. However, these existing prosodic phrases are found to be inadequate in analyzing L2 intonation seen as interlanguage. Instead, it consists of some unique phr...

Two hypotheses have been advanced in the recent literature with respect to the so-called Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit (ISIB): a nonnative speaker will be better understood by a another nonnative listener than a native speaker of the target language will be (a) only when the nonnatives share the same native language (matched interlanguage) or (b) even when the nonnatives have dif...

Competence models as point of origin for educational standards are the foundation of assessment and evaluation in view of educational goals and thereby provide major information for revision and improvement of instruction. Computer science education is a young discipline, compared to, e. g., the core subjects analyzed in the PISA studies (OECD, 2006), mathematics, reading and science. The appro...