children build on pragmatic information in language acquisition

Children Build on Pragmatic Information in LanguageAcquisition

Eve V. Clark1* and Patricia Matos Amaral21Stanford University and 2University of Liverpool

Abstract

Pragmatic information is integral to language use for both adults and children. Children rely oncontextually shared knowledge to communicate before they can talk: they make use of gesture toconvey their first meanings and then add words to gestures. Like adults, they build on joint attention,physical copresence, and conversational copresence both as they acquire and as they use language.This can be seen in children’s early communication, in their first inferences about word and utterancemeanings, and in their ability to make use of appropriate contextual information as they learn how tointerpret and produce terms like big or long compared to full, almost and only, and all and some.

1. Introduction

In communicating, children draw on pragmatic information—information from thediscourse context, and they do so from the start. Whether intent on getting a cookie, ordrawing attention to a light, they make do without words at first: They reach towardwhat they want; they point to draw attention. In relying on gaze and gesture, they aremaking use of the knowledge they share with their interlocutor by virtue of their situa-tional copresence, and of the interlocutor’s ability to make inferences in context. Aschildren get older, they start using words as well and so specify their intentions moreprecisely. Throughout the process of acquisition, children draw on elements from thediscourse context, its participants, and its spatial coordinates, to convey their intentions.In doing this, they depend on many of the same pragmatic factors as adults from the start.And over time, they also learn when and how to take up specific elements of contextpertinent to the interpretations of particular words. Whether children rely on gestures,words, or a combination of the two (just like adults), they build on conditions central tocommunicative interaction: joint attention with their interlocutor, physical copresence ofthemselves, the addressee, and the entity or event at the locus of attention, and conversa-tional copresence (Clark 2009; H. Clark 1996; Tomasello 1995).

In this article, we look at different types of pragmatic information and the role theyplay at different stages of language learning, starting with basic cognitive abilities (e.g.,intention recognition) essential to human communication, as other linguistic abilitiesdevelop, leading to more complex uses of language in context. We look first at children’sreliance on gesture and gaze before they start to use words; we then turn to their earlyability to make inferences about the intentions of others, and their own early use ofword-and-gesture combinations. We look at how children make inferences in context asthey try to establish meanings for new words and find ways to talk about new things. Wethen turn to children’s acquisition of deictic terms where they must establish the relevantcontext-based meanings. And we look at children’s understanding of how to accumulatecommon ground by adding new information. This, of course, requires cooperation in

Language and Linguistics Compass 4/7 (2010): 445–457, 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2010.00214.x

ª 2010 The AuthorsJournal Compilation ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

conversation. We then explore some specific cases where pragmatic information is acomponent of the meaning of lexical items: we look at children’s acquisition of adjectiveslike big and long (compared to full), quantifiers like all and some, focus particles like only,and approximative terms like almost.

2. Gestures Before Words

Children start to point themselves from age 10–12 months and can follow adult points atabout the same age (Moore and Dunham 1995). Pointing gestures draw attention toobjects and events for both children and adults, just as words can, but pointing at a specifictarget identifies the individual object or event as the referent in context (Lyons 1975;Kendon 2004). From around age one, young children also start to demonstrate compre-hension of words, even though they themselves are unable to produce them. Many earlyattempts at communicating typically rely on gesture and gaze: Children use gestures to getthe other’s attention and may gaze at something they want until they are given it. Theirgestures include some that are iconic in nature, as when a 1-year-old curves his hand andtilts it in front of his face, as if to drink––in a request for juice, or a 1;6-year-old tugs atthe adult’s hand to get her to come over to the door to open it (e.g., Bates 1976; Carter1978). Children use pointing gestures from early on to get someone else to attend toobjects or events of interest, and reaching gestures to signal that they want the otherperson to give them something (Werner and Kaplan 1963; Bates, Camaioni, & Volterra1975). For example, around age 1, young children also persist in their attempts tocommunicate. They use sustained gestures over successive episodes of adult misunder-standing and continue to reach toward a counter, say, as the adult proposes different candi-dates for what the child might actually want. As soon as the adult hits on the right object,the child relaxes and stops reaching (Golinkoff 1986). Effectively, early pointing andreaching are gestural precursors to the speech acts of asserting and requesting. Gestures andeye-gaze, deployed communicatively, presuppose an understanding of joint attention andintention recognition, both basic to non-natural communication in Grice’s sense.

Adults use gestures too as they talk to young children, and by pointing, for example,make clearer to young children just which object or event they are talking about in aspecific context. This in turn appears to help children in mapping unfamiliar words ontothe appropriate referents in context, such that the amount of adult gesture used is corre-lated with children’s later vocabulary size (e.g., Ozcaliskan and Goldin-Meadow 2006;Rowe and Goldin-Meadow 2009).

One-year-olds soon advance from producing gestures alone to combining gestures andsingle words. When they do so, they are more likely to elicit a response from an adult(76% of the time) than if they produce just a word on its own (with responses elicitedonly 42% of the time) (Kelly 2009). This may be because their early words are hard tointerpret. In effect, gestures help make the child’s intention clear: When a young childpoints at a dog and says dog, the point indicates that this entity is something to attend to,while the word identifies the referent (the dog) at the locus of joint attention.

Communication is collaborative, though, and because conversation provides theprimary setting for language use, children must also learn early on how to take turns.This ability may well emerge from reciprocal games, as when the adult hands the childsomething, the child gives it back, the adult hands it over again, and so on (Rheingold,Hay, & West 1976). Adults also ‘impose’ conversational turns by waiting until the childcontributes something, a smile, a burp, a single word, before resuming talk (Snow 1977).Adults demand more by way of a turn as children get older. But the timing of turn-

446 Eve V. Clark and Patricia Matos Amaral

ª 2010 The Authors Language and Linguistics Compass 4/7 (2010): 445–457, 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2010.00214.xJournal Compilation ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

taking takes several years to master: In dyadic interactions, adults wait for children tomake their next contribution, but in multiparty conversations, young children often comein too late, so their contributions appear irrelevant to the current topic (Garvey 1984;Dunn and Shatz 1989).

3. Inferences About Speaker Intentions

To communicate successfully, children need both to be able to make inferences about theintentions of others and to convey their own intentions. Their ability to make relevantinferences in context can be seen at work in such conversational exchanges as (1):

(1) D (1;11.28, talking at breakfast, as his father tapped on the edge of D’s bowl with a spoon):Herb hitting [«] bowl.

Father: Why was I hitting your bowl? Why was I hitting your bowl?D (grinning, as he picked up his spoon): [«] eat [«] cornflakes. [Clark, diary data]

By age 2, children readily infer that requests typically call for some action (Ervin-Tripp1974; Shatz 1978). Two-year-olds treat direct and indirect requests alike as ways of askingfor an action but may be attending only to the word(s) they recognize, e.g., just block inCould you put the block in the box?, along with the adult’s gaze (at the box) and anygestures the adult makes at the same time. Children begin by basing their inferencesabout intentions on what is present in the physical context and extend their inferences toinclude whatever they currently know about the meanings of specific words as well.Their understanding of requests, for example, changes as they come to understand notonly isolated words but also the full utterance these words occur in, on specific occasions.

One-year-olds make specific inferences about adult intentions. In one ingenious test ofthis, Gergely et al. (1995) set young children a copying task. The one-year-olds saweither an adult touch a knob on a box with her forehead while holding a shawl aroundher shoulders (inference: her hands are not free to do the action observed), or they sawan adult with her hands free but at her sides, touch the same knob on a box with herforehead. If the children were able to infer the adult intention in the two cases, theyshould copy exactly what the adult did more often in the second case (hands free) thanin the first (hands occupied). And they do. In short, the one-year-olds took into accountwhat else the adult was doing in context and inferred that the head action was not essen-tial for touching the knob. But when the adult was free to use her hands and did not doso, they inferred that she intended to touch the knob with her forehead.

Children’s inferences about gaze and gesture have also been explored in studies whereresearchers have tracked their ability to identify the intended target of a point or a look.Children aged 1;6, for example, are able to infer that an adult gaze combined with appar-ent searching is just that, a search for something mislaid or dropped. When watchingsomeone peg clothes onto a clothesline, for example, children this age will spontaneouslypick up and hand over a dropped clothes-peg. And after seeing an adult, with his handsfull of books, trying to open a cupboard door on one occasion, they spontaneously openthat cupboard door when the adult returns a second time, again laden with books (e.g.,Warneken and Tomasello 2006).

Such inferences in context reveal how attentive children are to what others are doing,or trying to do; they display in their reactions that they have inferred what the other’sgoal was on each occasion. This reliance on gestures and stance in context provides abasis for numerous general strategies for interpretation, to which children can addinferences linked to any accompanying language.

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4. Inferences About Word Meanings

When adults offer children new words, they first get the child’s attention (Estigarribiaand Clark 2007) and then introduce a word for a new object-type in a familiar frame likeThis is a ––, These are ––, or That’s called a ––. And they typically offer further informa-tion about unfamiliar referents––information about class-membership (It’s a kind of ––),about properties (It’s round, It’s furry) and parts (Those are his paws, That’s a handle), andabout actions and functions (They bite, It can pick things up). In providing such informa-tion, adults often use gestures at the same time. They use indicating gestures like pointingor showing to identify the referent (as in POINT + That’s a stingray) and to identifyproperties and parts, and they use demonstrating gestures as they talk about actions andfunctions (Clark and Wong 2002; Clark and Estigarribia 2009).

Adult gestures help establish joint attention at the start, and their actions can also guidethe assignment of meaning in context. For example, in learning a new word, childrenwho hear it repeatedly used with similar objects doing different actions assign it anobject-meaning, but children who hear it used with different objects doing the sameaction, assign it an action-meaning. In short, they use joint attention along with physicaland conversational copresence to decide whether the new word is intended to pick outan object or an action (e.g., Tomasello and Kruger 1992; Tomasello and Barton 1994).So children base their inferences about possible word meanings on whatever informationthey can derive from the physical setting (joint attention, physical copresence) and fromwhatever the other person is saying (conversational copresence).

Children’s inferences, then, depend in part on their use of information about thecurrent context and in part on their reliance on conventionality and contrast, two prag-matic principles governing language use. They recognize early that language is conven-tional and adult speakers are a source of conventional terms and expressions: For example,when young children make errors, adults offer reformulations that display in conventionalform how children could have said what they meant (e.g., Chouinard and Clark 2003).Children also follow adult usage in adopting words and constructions to convey specificmeanings in context. Conventionality depends in turn on the notion of contrast: if thespeaker used expression x, then the speaker meant x and not y or z. But if the speakercoins a new word instead of using an expected, conventional term such as z, the addresseeinfers that the speaker intended something that contrasts with z (Clark 1987, 1990).

Children make good use of contrast. Each time they encounter a new word, they startby assuming that its meaning contrasts with any other word meanings they already know.This allows them to work directly on what the conventional meaning of the word mightbe in context without delaying to check whether it has the same meaning as x or y, say.They also take advantage of the pragmatic, contextually grounded directions adults offerwhen they present children with added information about new word meanings (Clarkand Wong 2002):

(2) a. Inclusion: A dog is a kind of animal; an oak is a tree; a sting-ray is a kind of fishb. Properties: That ball is made of rubber; zebras have stripesc. Function: Knives are for cuttingd. Parts: That’s the rabbit’s tail

And when 2- and 3-year-olds are taught a new word, x, for one set of referents and thenintroduced to a second new word, y, and told that a y is a kind of x, they take in theinformation about class-membership and make use of it when they are later tested on the



meaning of y. They correctly provide both x’s and y’s, for instance, when asked for ‘allthe x’s’ (Clark and Grossman 1998; see also Waxman and Senghas 1992).

When children lack a word for something, they have recourse to several options. Theycan make use of general-purpose terms––deictics like that (typically accompanied by anindicating gesture of some sort) for making reference to objects, or a general-purposeverb like do for making reference to actions. Or they can coin a new term, usingelements they already know. They construct noun compounds like fire-dog (‘a dog foundat the site of a local fire’), car-smoke (‘exhaust from a car’, coined in contrast to house-smoke, from a chimney), or plate-egg (‘fried egg’, used in contrast to cup-egg, for a boiledegg), all from two-year-olds (Clark 1993). They also coin verbs (e.g., piano ‘play thepiano’, rug ‘vacuum the rug’, scale ‘weigh’, or oar ‘row’), as needed, again from age 2 on.

When adult speakers coin a new word, they rely on a Gricean contract in making suretheir addressees will be able to interpret that word in context, as the speaker intended(Clark and Clark 1979). This contract assumes that the speaker should make the newword computable in context, and the addressee should make use of context to computethe intended meaning of the new word. Because children’s coinages occur in context,typically in situations where both adult and child are attending to the same object orevent, adults can usually interpret such coinages quite readily. And as children come tolearn the conventional terms, e.g., the verb row in lieu of oar, fried egg in lieu of plate-egg,or pajamas in lieu of sleepers, they give up their own coinage and adopt the conventionalterm in its place. At the same time, just like adults, they continue to coin words wherethere is no conventional term available.

5. Inferences Tied to Language Use

Certain terms in language carry information that can only be interpreted in context.Their meanings depend on who used the word, who was addressed, where, and when.Terms like these include pronouns (I, you, he), locative adverbs (here, there), demonstra-tives (this, that), and verbs (come, go, bring, take). Take the pronouns I (the speaker) andyou (the addressee): Only on the occasion of a specific utterance can we identify theintended referent of I (the speaker on that occasion); the same goes for you. Thesepronouns shift meaning with each speaker and addressee. While children produce I andyou early, 2-year-olds may start with fixed instead of shifting reference, so ‘I’ is the adultand ‘you’ the child. They appear less likely to do this if they have older siblings, andhence more opportunity to observe the shifting nature of pronoun uses (e.g., Halliday1975; Charney 1980; Loveland 1984; Oshima-Takane 1988).

Deictic terms point to the referent intended in context (Levinson 1983). Some ofthem, like here and there, have both shifting reference and shifting boundaries: here in thisroom vs. here in California, for instance. Here refers to a space near the current speaker,while there refers to one that is further away. This gives a proximal–distal dimension ofcontrast, but few children master this before age 4 or 5. Early uses of here typicallyaccompany transfers of possession, while early uses of there tend to mark completion ofsome activity. Children take longer to master the proximal–distal aspect of this ⁄ these andthat ⁄ those (Clark 1978; Clark and Sengul 1978). And longer still, up to age 8 or 9, beforethey master the deictic uses of verbs like come and go, or bring and take (e.g., Clark andGarnica 1974).

Pronouns and determiners (e.g., a, the) play an important role in identifying referentsin context and in indicating whether information is ‘given’ or ‘new’ for the addressee.Between age 3 and 4, children begin to systematically distinguish ‘new’ from ‘given’



(e.g., Serratrice 2005; Rozendaal and Baker 2008; see also Matthews et al. 2006,Matthews, Lieven, & Tomasello 2007). As a result, they get better at choosing appro-priate expressions to refer to the things they talk about for their addressees. They payattention to both discourse and context and begin to integrate them as they themselvestake turns and participate in conversation.

6. Cooperation in Conversation

Conversational exchanges are based on the cooperative principle, such that speaker andaddressee coordinate with each other as they talk, to update common ground. This inturn depends on appropriate use of the maxims of quantity (be as informative as needed),quality (be truthful), manner (be clear), and relation (be relevant) (Grice 1989). Thesemaxims, of course, depend on the participants in a conversation sharing a joint locus ofattention, but young children cannot take into account the maxims of quantity or manneruntil they have acquired enough language. They appear to observe both quality and rela-tion from very early: they make contributions that, although limited, are generally bothtrue and relevant. The maxim of manner enjoins speakers to be clear, brief, and orderlyin their contributions. This maxim is highly pertinent to how speakers accumulatecommon ground as they talk. But the extent to which young children either ratify whatthe other speaker has just said, and so place that information in common ground, orcontribute something new themselves remains limited for some time.

Each contribution in a communicative exchange should ideally build on what isalready given and add something new. And what is new is then added, in its turn, tocommon ground. But learning how to construct the appropriate content for a turn inconversation takes time. In single-word utterances, children may use their words to pickout only what is new in the context (yet often relevant to the previous speaker’s turn)(e.g., Dunn and Shatz 1989). But they often fail to ratify new information from anotherspeaker. When they do succeed in doing this, typically by repeating the relevant informa-tion, they tend to have difficulty in then adding further new information themselves. Byage 2, children often repeat what the adult has just offered, but then they stop, the turnended, and wait for the adult to carry the exchange further. By 3;6, although, they havebecome more skilled at adding further new information themselves as they take turns,and can both ratify the other’s new information, and add their own, in the same turn(e.g., Clark and Bernicot 2008).

How cooperative are children as conversational partners? Experimental studies havefocused on how children compute conversational implicatures and, in particular, the scalarimplicatures triggered by logical connectives like and and or, quantified expressions like alland some, or modal verbs like must and might. Some early work on some and all, for exam-ple, found that preschool children, unlike adults, give positive answers to the question‘Do some elephants have trunks?’ (Smith 1980). And while adults tend to assign an exclu-sive interpretation to or (either x, or y, but not both), children tend to give it the inclu-sive interpretation found in logic textbooks (Paris 1973; Sternberg 1979; Braine andRumain 1981).

These findings were interpreted as revealing that children do not initially calculateconversational implicatures at all. Instead, they first interpret such terms according to theirliteral meanings and fail to bridge the gap between ‘what is said’ (in the logical sense) and‘what is meant’ (Noveck 2001, 2004; Pouscoulous and Noveck 2009). But is this true ingeneral for conversational implicature?



Children begin on the meanings of quantifiers early on, and by 3;6 manage to interpretall correctly in situations where, for a set of garages, say, they are asked to judge whetherall the doors are shut (Donaldson and Lloyd 1974). Notice that this demands attention toa single property of each garage. If instead, children have to deal with a relation betweentwo sets of objects in an array, for example five cars and six garages, where each car is ina garage (so five garages are full and one empty, say), they do not fare so well. Whenasked whether All the garages have cars in them (no, therefore false) or whether All the carsare in the garages (yes, therefore true), children between 3;6 and 5;0 consistently givepriority to the physical array where there is a one-to-one match-up of garages and cars.If one garage is empty, or if one car is left over, they consistently judge both the earlierdescriptions to be false, regardless of whether all quantifies over garages or cars. In short,they know the sentences concern cars, garages, and all, but they fail to take the full syntac-tic structure into account in their interpretations. The same children, although, makeadult-like judgments of sentences like The red car is the only car in the garage, and Only thered car has got a man in it. In summary, children under five find the quantifier all difficultwhen they have to relate two physical sets in an array but easy when they focus on justone property of the members of a set.

Logical connectives, quantified expressions, and some aspectual verbs like start andfinish can be ordered along entailment-based scales (Horn 1972, 2004; Levinson 2000). Insuch scales, an informatively ‘stronger’ term like all entails all the terms to its right (e.g.,all > some > a few), and the use of a ‘‘weaker’’ term (e.g., some) conversationally impli-cates that a stronger term (all) either does not hold or cannot be truthfully asserted by thespeaker, by Grice’s maxim of quantity. Children appear not to compute inferences thatadults make here as a matter of course. For example, they fail to reject the use of weakerterms in scenarios where stronger terms can be truthfully asserted (Papafragou andMusolino 2003; Guasti et al. 2005; Musolino and Lidz 2006). Typically, the weaker termis true, but its use would be inappropriate or misleading given the conventions of adultuse (note the oddness of Some, in fact all, of my children went to college). More recently, thiswork has been extended to pragmatic inferences about sequence and cause triggered bythe maxim of manner and associated with the use of and (Noveck et al. 2009).

In these studies, what children know about the meanings of particular words is difficultto disentangle from their ability to make inferences in context about adult intentions,especially in bare experimental settings without the rich contextual information availablein normal conversation. Not only do experimental tasks differ from naturalistic conversa-tion, they often fail to make clear that the implicature is part of the speaker’s meaning,because its relevance may not always be apparent in the task. One important question yetto be answered is whether children understand the distinction, central to these studies,between what is ‘‘true’’ and what is ‘‘inappropriate’’ (i.e., infelicitous).

In more naturalistic settings, children’s understanding of utterances with some suggeststhey can indeed compute the relevant scalar implicature––some and not all. In situationsinvolving different types of scales, either quantificational (i.e., a Horn-scale of quantifica-tional determiners <all, some>), where the child judged whether a toy had eaten some orall of his sandwich, or pragmatic, where the scales were not directly associated withspecific words (Fauconnier 1975; Hirschberg 1985): an ‘‘encyclopedic’’ scale that orderedparts of a house vs. the whole (had the toy animal painted just the roof or the wholehouse?), and an ‘ad hoc’ scale based on a contextually defined part-whole relation (hadthe toy animal wrapped the two presents he should wrap or just one?). Four-year-oldsnot only calculated the relevant implicatures, but also retrieved the relevant ordering fromcontext (Papafragou and Tantalou 2004; see also Davies and Katsos [forthcoming]). They



readily identified the premise needed for the inferential reasoning behind the speaker’sintended meaning.

In pragmatically natural tasks, then, young children can identify the contextualelements relevant for utterance interpretation, whether or not this is required by themeanings of particular words. Notice that not all scales are equivalent in difficulty here:5-year-olds do better with number words (five > four > two) than with aspectual verbs(finish > start) or quantifiers (all > some) (Papafragou and Musolino 2003). How (and howoften) children produce scalar terms, and how often they appear in child directed speech,though, remain open questions.

7. Pragmatic Inferences From Specific Words

Pragmatic information is closely intertwined with the semantics of certain words. Takeadjectives like big or long: to determine whether something is big, one must first identifya standard of comparison that is contextually relevant and the set of objects to becompared. From early on, children incorporate different sources of information to makejudgments in context about the properties of objects (Smith, Cooney, & McCord 1986;Ebeling and Gelman 1988, 1994; Gelman and Ebeling 1989). As young as age 3, theycan distinguish different types of gradable adjectives with respect to how their meaninginteracts with the discourse context. When asked ‘Please give me the big one’ whenshown two objects that differ in size, children appropriately set the standard of compari-son and hand over the bigger member of the pair. But when asked ‘Please give me thefull one’, shown two containers where neither is full, children respond in a different way.If the child and the experimenter had previously seen a pair of containers where one wasindeed full, children are more likely to reject the request; if they have not been exposedearlier to a full container, they select the ‘fuller one’ of the two in front of them. Thisfinding suggests that children distinguish relative gradable adjectives like big or long, wherethe standard of comparison is given contextually, from absolute gradable adjectives with amaximum standard like full, where only a non-empty container counts as ‘full’. Moreimportantly, children can adjust the standard of comparison in context and take intoaccount what might count as ‘full enough’ for the requester, given their common groundon that occasion (Syrett 2007; Syrett, Kennedy, & Lidz, 2010).

Another case in point is the interpretation of focus particles. Understanding the mean-ing of focus particles (e.g., only, even) is a challenge for the language learner. Here, thechild must take account of the relevant linguistic context, namely the alternatives tothe focused constituent, and identify the relation between the focused constituent and themembers of the set of alternatives. The disparate findings here present a mixed picture ofchildren’s pragmatic abilities.

Children appear not to compute the implications that adults draw in the same contexts(e.g. Paterson et al. 2003; Bergsma 2006), but they sometimes appear able to identifyrelevant pragmatic information (Bergsma 1999; Nederstigt 2006; Amaral 2009, in prepa-ration). Consider the case of almost: Can 4- to 6-year-olds identify the elements of thescale (namely, the order and the endpoint) required for its interpretation? For example,on hearing One of the frogs got almost to the lily pad, the child must identify a spatial pathwith the lily pad as the endpoint and understand the ordering of different frogs along thatpath. In one study (Amaral 2009), children saw slides of animals taking part in jumpingcompetitions and answered questions like ‘Which frog jumped almost to the lily pad?’,‘Which animal jumped almost as far as the kangaroo?’. In another condition, they sawslides of characters with different numbers of objects. After counting the amount for each



character, they were asked ‘Which boy has almost 5 blocks?’ While 4-year-olds giveadult-like interpretations of the sentences with number words and directional preposi-tional phrases about 60% of the time, they did not do so well with comparatives like ‘asfar as’. Overall, the results suggest that they have acquired the implications conveyed bythe semantics of almost and they can use contextual information to identify the relevantscale for interpreting it. At the same time, some scales (e.g., numerical order) are acquiredearlier than others, and this plays a role in children’s interpretation of sentences contain-ing almost.

How do children interpret exclusive versus additive focus particles (e.g., exclusive:English only, French seulement ‘only’, vs. additive: German auch ‘also’, noch ‘still’, Dutchook ‘also, too’)? With English only, children may fail to identify the set of alternativesrelevant in the experimental context up to age 7 (Paterson et al. 2003). They interpretsentences with only as having the same meaning as the corresponding sentence withoutonly. Do they really lack the relevant pragmatic knowledge, as proposed by Paterson et al.(2003)? Probably not. They know what the alternatives are but may not yet realize thatthose alternatives are relevant to the interpretation of the focus particle being used on thatoccasion. In a truth-judgment task with Dutch alleen ‘only’, where the alternatives weremade salient in context, children did much better, and even the youngest (aged 3 and 4),supplied adult-like responses with subject NP-focus 67% of the time, and objectNP-focus 61% of the time (Bergsma 1999). In short, on most occasions, by around age4, children interpret alleen in an adult fashion. Yet the findings for Dutch ook ‘also, too’resemble those for English only (Bergsma 2006): Either children fail to compute the addi-tive implication of ook or they fail to identify the relevant set of alternatives to thefocused element in a picture verification task.

These findings from experimental comprehension tasks, although, contrast with natu-ralistic observations. For instance, longitudinal data on a monolingual German child’s usesof additive noch ‘still, again’ and auch ‘also, too’ show that this child’s production of thefocus particles was all pragmatically felicitous and adult-like in context (Nederstigt 2006).This, although, could well be attributed to children’s reliance on largely formulaic uses ineach context.

Does the interpretation of exclusive and additive particles follow the same develop-mental path? Kail (1978b) argued that French additive meme ‘same’ and aussi ‘also, too’and exclusive seulement ‘only’ focus particles are acquired differently, with adult-like inter-pretation of additive particles before exclusive particles. (She also argued [Kail 1978a] thatcomprehension of encore ‘still’ is mastered before that of aussi ‘too’; these are both additiveparticles.) Up to age 6, children commonly ignore the semantics of focus for all threeparticles in French––meme, aussi, seulement––in verification tasks: They interpret thesentences correctly, but do not take into account the additive implications of aussi andmeme or the exclusive implication of seulement: ‘Tout se passe donc comme si les enfants‘‘omettaient’’ le modificateur’ (Kail 1978b: 769). But in picture verification tasks or tasksinvolving utterances divorced from an interactive discourse, it is unclear that the additiveor exclusive implication is even relevant in context.

We have reviewed just a few of the domains where children necessarily rely onpragmatic information, either alone, as in the earliest stages of learning to communicate,or in combination with what they know so far about their language. From early on, chil-dren use pragmatic information as they learn to interact as conversational partners andnegotiate meaning. From following eye-gaze and establishing joint attention, there is along road to more sophisticated integration of pragmatic knowledge with specific lexicalmeanings and syntactic knowledge. The development of communicative interaction,



although, suggests there is some continuity in the skills that develop as children movefrom early childhood toward adult expertise.

Short Biographies

Eve V. Clark does research on first language acquisition, in particular on how childrenassign meaning to words––the inferences they make in context, their coining of newwords for new meanings, and the kinds of information adults offer them about meaningsthrough both speech and gesture. She has worked extensively on the acquisition ofEnglish, French, and Hebrew, combining longitudinal observations with experimentalstudies, and has published articles in Cognition, Language, Journal of Child Language, ChildDevelopment and elsewhere, as well as chapters in numerous edited volumes. Her booksinclude Psychology and Language (1977, with H. H. Clark), The Ontogenesis of Meaning(1979), The Acquisition of Romance, with special reference to French (1985), The Lexicon inAcquisition (1993), First Language Acquisition (2003, 2nd edn 2009), and Constructions inAcquisition (2006, co-edited with B. F. Kelly). She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fel-low at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a Visiting Scientistat the Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and is a foreign member of the Nether-lands Royal Academy of Sciences. She holds a PhD in Linguistics and an MA HonoursDegree in French Language & Literature from the University of Edinburgh. She is cur-rently the Richard W. Lyman Professor in Humanities and Professor of Linguistics atStanford University.

Patricia Matos Amaral works on the semantics and pragmatics of scalar adverbs and hasbeen studying children’s acquisition of approximative terms like almost and nearly. She hasalso published articles on tense and aspect, semantic change, and language contact. Shereceived her undergraduate degree in Classical Languages and Portuguese, and an MA inLinguistics from the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and her PhD in Hispanic Linguis-tics from the Ohio State University, in 2007. She has been a recipient of fellowships fromthe Fulbright Commission, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and the Deutscher Aka-demischer Austauschdienst. She then did postdoctoral research at Stanford, with supportfrom the Portuguese Foundation for Science & Technology and from The SpencerFoundation before taking up a Lectureship in Portuguese Studies in the School of Lan-guages at the University of Liverpool.

Acknowledgement

Preparation of this paper and some of the research reported here was supported by TheSpencer Foundation (2080211).

Note

* Correspondence address: Eve V. Clark, Department of Linguistics, Margaret Jacks Hall, Bldg 460, StanfordUniversity, Stanford, CA 94305-2150, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

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children build on pragmatic information in language acquisition

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