Against Isomorphism and the Maxim of Charity in child language acquisition: Implications for the validity of the TVJT methodology
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Öner Özçelik
Abstract
This paper investigates children’s interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences containing negation and quantification, such as Donald didn’t find two guys, and Two horses didn’t jump over the fence. It has been argued, in previous literature, that children interpret such sentences only on their surface scope reading, i. e., on the interpretation ‘It’s not the case that Donald found two guys,’ instead of the adult-preferred inverse scope interpretation ‘There are two guys that Donald didn’t find,’ a phenomenon often called the Observation of Isomorphism. The present study shows, however, that this argument, even in its weakest interpretation, does not hold true, and that the apparent Isomorphism effect is an artifact of the experimental procedures used in previous studies. It also shows, based on Relevance Theory, and drawing from a series of novel experiments with 5-year-olds, that the reason why children seemed, in previous studies, to favor surface scope interpretations was because they made their decisions based on the set or information that they viewed as most “relevant” in a given context. It is concluded that children differ from adults not in scopal options their grammar allows, but in that they rank “salience” higher as a cue for general “relevance” than the Maxim of Charity, though for adults, the Maxim of Charity is at least equally relevant.
Acknowledgments
I owe special thanks to Tanja Kupisch and Brendan Gillon for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. I would also like to extend my special thanks to Andrea Gualmini for getting me first interested in this topic and for insightful discussion and comments on some of the ideas presented in this paper. I would like to thank the children and the staff of the McGill Childcare Center, as well as the parents of the children, without whom this research would not have been possible. Special thanks to Emily Kashul for help with running the subjects. Finally, thanks to Sukhrob Karimov for creating the images used in the paper.
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©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The development of iterative verbal periphrases in Romance
- Interfaces between linguistic systems: Evidence from Child Language
- Against Isomorphism and the Maxim of Charity in child language acquisition: Implications for the validity of the TVJT methodology
- The mapping of space onto the domain of benefaction and some unpredicted trends in semantic change
- Investigating language change using Anglo-Norman spoken and written register data
- On the possibility of proper verbs
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The development of iterative verbal periphrases in Romance
- Interfaces between linguistic systems: Evidence from Child Language
- Against Isomorphism and the Maxim of Charity in child language acquisition: Implications for the validity of the TVJT methodology
- The mapping of space onto the domain of benefaction and some unpredicted trends in semantic change
- Investigating language change using Anglo-Norman spoken and written register data
- On the possibility of proper verbs
