Four-year-old children compute scalar implicatures in absence of epistemic reasoning
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Children exhibit sophisticated mental state (epistemic) reasoning abilities from an early age, but it remains unclear what role these abilities play in the development of pragmatic inference in language acquisition. Here, we examined the role of epistemic reasoning in scalar implicature. Experiment 1 found that most 4-year-olds successfully computed a sub-type of scalar implicature ( ad hoc implicatures), despite failing to compute so-called “ignorance implicatures”, a type of epistemic inference that Gricean models of pragmatics deem necessary for scalar implicature. In Experiment 2 , we tested 4- and 5-year-old children, and replicated the finding that children compute ad hoc implicatures more readily than ignorance implicatures, and that children’s difficulties with ignorance implicature are unrelated to performance on Theory of Mind tasks.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it