Contrastive Inference and Comprehension in Children

Tell us about your thesis topic:

My topic is in the linguistic realm of pragmatics, which is basically all of the extra information we use to enrich our understanding of what people really mean by what they say.  

I was interested in how certain parts of linguistic context (like the details of a short story) can help, or hinder, how 4-7 year old children enrich the meaning of what is said.

I looked at very simple sentences that were ambiguous as to whether or not both characters in a story were taking part in the event, and compared that to how adults do in the same task.  These ambiguous contexts were also compared to non ambiguous contexts.

A non ambiguous context would be a story like: 

Bill and Sally wanted to buy a snack for later.  Only Sally bought candy.

An ambiguous context would be a story like:

Sally and Bill wanted to buy a snack for later.  Sally bought candy.

Participants were then asked, by a forgetful character, "Did Bill buy candy?". 

In non-ambiguous contexts, using "only" in the story shows that it is not possible for Bill to have bought candy, as only Sally did.

However, in the ambiguous context, it is not necessarily clear if Bill did or did not buy candy.  Therefore the correct answer depended on whether or not the participant wanted to answer logically or pragmatically.

If participants wanted to be logical, in an ambiguous context they would generally say "I don't know" because we didn't say what Bill bought.

If participants wanted to be pragmatic, they would have said "no" because if you meant that both Sally and Bill bought candy, you would have said so.

For the more pragmatic-linguistically trained, this process of deciding who did the action is reliant on something called an ad hoc scale, and a process known as exhaustification of alternative propositions.  Basically this means that we, as hearers, eliminate alternative things that could have been said, but we're not, for example: "Sally and Bill bought candy" or "Bill bought candy" and decide that since neither of these were said, and you could have said both people if you meant both, then the other person did not buy candy.  

What was found was that children, in this experiment, were really successful in using the pragmatic skills we were looking at (contrastive inference via exhaustification) and performed better than the adults did.  Adults, on the other hand, although they were also mostly pragmatic, over thought the task and were significantly more likely to approach the task logically compared to pragmatically.

Future work needs to be done though in order to sort out the longitudinal acquisition of the skill as there was some difficulties in the four year old age group, but the sample size wasn't large enough to run statistics on the different age groups in the children.  I also would like to see what would be the case I'd adults were not able to say "I don't know".

What this ultimately means though is that by five years of age, children have a pretty good handle on this pragmatic skill in simple situations.  But, it is likely only when children are able to understand what the expectations are for that communication and interaction.  It also means that more research needs to be done, and there are lots of interesting things still to figure out regarding the use and learning of language.

What was the most valuable outcome of the graduate program for you?

I think that the most valuable thing for me has been proving to myself that all of the skills and learning over the years was able to be applied in a real and meaningful way, and that it mattered.  Graduate programs will push you to your limits and so that challenge really showed me that I am a capable and resilient individual.

That being said, I could not have gotten through and been successful without support from my mentors and supervisor, the faculty and staff, and a fantastic cohort of peers and friends.  It can feel really isolating working on some niche topic for 2 to 3 years, so it is important to have people you can go to for help, guidance, or just someone also in the same boat who reminds you that you're not alone.

But, I persisted, I worked really hard, and I had a lot of fun getting to engage with the field of linguistics in a much more direct and interesting way.  It was like going from just watching a movie to being able to direct a movie.  I look forward to more research and engagement with linguistics in the future as my career continues.

What are the next steps/plans for you?

First I'm going to take a break and just enjoy my summer.  After that I am attending McGill this September to start another graduate program.  I am doing an MSc in Communication and Speech Disorders to become a speech language pathologist.  The goal is to eventually do a combined PhD in both linguistics and communication and speech disorders.  This is so that I can use the linguistic basic science and theory to inform applied practice.  I want to ensure that non-typical speech populations are able to get informed and scientifically motivated treatment and diagnosis as early as possible, so that intervention can happen sooner and be more effective.