Romanian 5-year-olds derive global but not local implicatures with quantifiers embedded under epistemic adverbs: Evidence from a shadow play paradigm

Abstract

Our paper investigates the rates with which Romanian 5years-olds and adults derive local and global implicatures. We test a novel combination of multiple scalar terms, where quantifiers are embedded under epistemic adverbs such as Poate cǎ unii câini sunt albaştri ‘It is possible that some dogs are blue.’ In our study, we employ a shadow play paradigm, where participants reward a baby dragon for his guesses about various silhouettes of animals hiding behind a curtain. Such a paradigm creates a situation of indirect access, which makes epistemics adequate in the context. Both Romanian adults and children derived few local implicatures but a considerable number of global implicatures, especially not-certain-some global implicatures, where possible is strengthened to not certain. We observed an interaction of group and implicature type with children deriving fewer global implicatures than adults. Our findings are more compatible with a pragmatic account of implicatures than a grammatical one. Moreover, they are in contrast with previous work by Bill (2017) and Bill et al. (2021), who found that children derived more local implicatures than adults (~50%), but few global ones. We take our results to suggest that local implicature rates may decrease when the embedded scalar terms do not belong to the same scale as the non-embedded ones, but rather to different scales (<certain, possible>, <all, some>). We also explore other possible explanations for the low local implicatures rates in terms of the role of uncertainty and the role of the possible/certain contrast as a question under discussion.