Is it possible that the difference in children’s performance across the two experiments is due to the tasks requiring different types of competence: for example, that experiment 1 requires the derivation of quantity implicatures but experiment 2 only requires sensitivity to informativeness? We cannot see any motivation

for postulating this. The experiments do not differ in terms of visual or procedural complexity, and use exactly the same linguistic stimuli, visual animations and overall scenario. Moreover, the experiments do not differ in terms of the meta-linguistic demands of the task, as they both require participants to pass judgment on utterances. The only apparent difference is the use of a ternary scale in experiment 2, which enables participants to give a response that is more lenient than a downright rejection but stricter than a thorough endorsement of the utterance. If our claims are well-founded, it should follow that children’s pragmatic PD0332991 competence is best investigated using paradigms in which pragmatic tolerance cannot cloud the interpretation of the participants’ EPZ-6438 concentration performance. To test this supposition, we

now turn to the sentence-to-picture matching paradigm, where participants are visually presented with four outcomes of a scenario, and they are asked to select the picture that matches their interpretation of the utterances used in experiments 1 and 2. The computer-based judgement task used in experiments 1 and 2 was modified as follows. The experimenter explains that participants will see some stories and that Mr. Caveman will narrate what is going on in the story. After being introduced

to each story, the participant will be presented with four pictures on the screen, and Mr. Caveman will say what eventually happened in the story that he has in his mind. The participant should then point to the picture that matches Mr. Caveman’s story. The trials begin as in experiments 1 and 2. After the initial screen display showing click here the protagonist and the objects that may be affected, participants are shown a second screen divided into four (see Appendix C for a sample visual display). Mr. Caveman then says ‘In my story…’ and then continues his utterance with the pre-recorded utterances used in experiments 1 and 2. Participants are then asked to point to the picture that matches Mr. Caveman’s story. The pictures differed in the type of objects that were depicted as affected by the protagonist’s actions (e.g. carrots, pumpkins; heart, triangle) and in their quantity (some or all, either or both). For example, in a critical trial for scalar ‘some’, participants were presented with four pictures, corresponding to the situations in which the mouse picked up three out of five carrots, or three out of five pumpkins, or five out of five carrots, or five out of five pumpkins. They then heard ‘In my story, the mouse picked up some of the carrots’.