Some pieces are missing: Implicature production in children

Until at least 4 years of age, children, unlike adults, interpret  some  as compatible with  all . The inability to draw the pragmatic inference leading to interpret  some  as  not all , could be taken to indicate a delay in pragmatic abilities, despite evidence of other early pragmatic skills. However, little is known about how the production of these implicature develops. We conducted a corpus study on early production and perception of the scalar term  some  in British English. Children's utterances containing  some  were extracted from the dense corpora of five children aged 2;00 to 5;01 ( N  = 5,276), and analysed alongside a portion of their caregivers' utterances with  some  ( N  = 9,030). These were coded into structural and contextual categories allowing for judgments on the probability of a scalar implicature being intended. The findings indicate that children begin producing and interpreting implicatures in a pragmatic way during their third year of life, shortly after they first produce  some . Their production of  some  implicatures is low but matches their parents' input in frequency. Interestingly, the mothers' production of implicatures also increases as a function of the children's age. The data suggest that as soon as they acquire  some , children are fully competent in its production and mirror adult production. The contrast between the very early implicature production we find and the relatively late implicature comprehension established in the literature calls for an explanation; possibly in terms of the processing cost of implicature derivation. Additionally,  some  is multifaceted, and thus, implicatures are infrequent, and structurally and contextually constrained in both populations.