Comprehension of relevance implicatures by pre-schoolers: The case of adjectives

Research on the acquisition of relevance implicatures usually shows that it is not until age six that children learn to draw relevance inferences. However, Schulze et al. (in press) demonstrated that the ability of children to comprehend implicatures might have been underestimated due to the relatively complex and metalinguistic nature of the tasks. When implicature generation is naturally embedded in an ongoing interaction and supported by joint attention, even three-year-olds appear to succeed. The present paper develops this research path and tests comprehension of relevance implicatures based on adjectives in two experiments in which implicature reading was a necessary step in a shopping game. Experiment 1 demonstrated that five-year-olds are adult-like in drawing relevance inferences from evaluative adjectives used in argumentative contexts. Three-year-olds, although having more difficulty with negative items, still performed above chance across all conditions. Experiment 2 extended this finding to even younger children (2;6–3;6) and revealed that the presence of joint attention helps toddlers to comprehend negative utterances. Children not supported by joint attention performed at chance with indirect negative utterances, whereas children in the joint-attention condition coped equally well with positive and negative trials.

► Comprehension of indirectly used adjectives by 3- and 5-year-olds is examined.
► Children are able to draw relevance inferences earlier than previous research shows.
► Natural goal-oriented interaction makes inference-reading accessible to toddlers.
► Joint attention is crucial to implicature understanding.