Children's comprehension of disjunction
For my Ph.D. dissertation, I am looking into Bengali children’s comprehension of the disjunction word or. My work is informed by the current literature on children’s pragmatic acquisition, especially the acquisition of the scalar implicature, and is influenced by the ideas of the Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995). My research question is whether preschool children can derive scalar implicature from disjunctive sentences if they are well-supported by contextual information. To answer the question, I am using experimental methods which are geared toward bringing maximum relevance to the children in the studies. My work also incorporates knowledge from the research done on the Theory of Mind. Below, I have added a list of references to give you a preliminary idea about the nature and scope of my work:
- Barner, D., Brooks, N., & Bale, A. (2011). Accessing the unsaid: The role of scalar alternatives in children’s pragmatic inference. Cognition, 118(1), 84–93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2010.10.010
- Chierchia, G., Crain, S., Guasti, M. T., Gualmini, A., & Meroni, L. (2001). The Acquisition of Disjunction: Evidence for a Grammatical View of Scalar Implicatures. 25th Proceedings of the Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 25(1), 157–168
- Guasti, M. T., Chierchia, G., Crain, S., Foppolo, F., Gualmini, A., & Meroni, L. (2005). Why children and adults sometimes (but not always) compute implicatures. Language and Cognitive Processes, 20(5), 667–696. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690960444000250
- Papafragou, A., & Musolino, J. (2003). Scalar implicatures: Experiments at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Cognition, 86(3), 253–282. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0010-0277(02)00179-8
- Skordos, D., & Papafragou, A. (2016). Children’s derivation of scalar implicatures: Alternatives and relevance. Cognition, 153, 6–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2016.04.006
- Tieu, L., Romoli, J., Zhou, P., & Crain, S. (2015). Children’s Knowledge of Free Choice Inferences and Scalar Implicatures. Journal of Semantics, 33. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffv001
- Noveck, I. A. (2001). When children are more logical than adults: Experimental investigations of scalar implicature. Cognition, 78(2), 165–188. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0010-0277(00)00114-1
Results thus far:
- Presented at the 4th South Asian Forum on the Acquisition and Processing of Language (SAFAL), Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, December 8, 2023.
- Presented at the 12th Annual Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development (BCCCD), Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, January 10-14, 2022.
Processing scalar implicature
In this project, I am exploring adults’ processing of scalar implicature. My interest is to test whether implicature derivation is cognitively costly. I hypothesize that the processing effort required to compute scalar implicature is the same as the computation of logical meaning. It is because both lower-bounded (logical) meaning and upper-bounded (implicature) meaning are not removed from context, and contextual information is not necessarily actively sought by the listener; rather it is given as the hearer’s cognitive environment. Please have a look at the following list to get an idea of the scope of the research.
- Bott, L., & Noveck, I.A. (2004). Some utterances are underinformative: The onset and time course of scalar inferences. Journal of Memory and Language, 51(3):437–457. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2004.05.006
- De Neys, W., & Schaeken, W. (2007). When people are more logical under cognitive load: Dual task impact on scalar implicature. Experimental Psychology, 54(2),128–133. https://doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169.54.2.128
- Degen, J., & Tanenhaus, M.K. (2015). Processing scalar implicature: A constraint-based approach. Cognitive science, 39(4), 667 710.https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12171
- Huang, Y.T., & Snedeker, J. (2009). Online interpretation of scalar quantifiers: Insight into the semantics-pragmatics interface. Cognitive Psychology, 58, 376–415. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2008.09.001
- Politzer-Ahles, S., & Fiorentino, R. (2013). The realization of scalar inferences: Context sensitivity without processing cost. PloS One, 8(5), e63943. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0063943
- Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and cognition, 2nd ed (pp. viii, 326). Blackwell Publishing.
Results thus far:
- Presented at the CogLingDays 2022, Belgium-Netherlands Cognitive Linguistics Association (BeNeCLA), Tilburg University, Tilburg, the Netherlands, December 8-9, 2022.
Disjunction expressions in Indian languages: Usage of conditional morphemes
This project aims to capture the nature of disjunction words used in the languages of the Indian sub-continent. Indian languages like Hindi or Bengali use more than one expression to refer to disjunction in sentences. For example, Hindi uses ‘yā’ and ‘nahito’; Bengali uses ‘bā ‘ and ‘noyto’ to refer to disjunction. Interestingly, words like ‘nahito’ and ‘noyto’ are bi-morphemic which can be split into an ‘if not’ construction. This phenomenon is not noticed in languages such as English, Japanese, Mandarin, or French for instance. Such bi-morphemic disjunction expressions are seen in other Indian languages too. Such as Meitei, a north-east Indian language, uses the word ‘natraga’ or ‘natradi’ to refer to disjunction which too have the ‘if-not’ meaning. For example, ‘natra’ means ‘not’ and ‘ga’ is a conditional bound morpheme.
I aim to investigate why there is more than one expression for disjunction in these languages, which is not very common in other languages, and how these expressions are used in these languages - especially what significance the ‘if-not’ construction holds in these languages. My greater objective is to see how the information can feed/counter the existing theories about the human language faculty.