The Language Comprehension Lab is thrilled to announce a very special guest: Hugh Rabagliati (Edinburgh) will talk at our lab meeting from 2:15-3pm on March 6th (AP&M 4452).
All are welcome!
Learning dimensions of meaning
Words such as ‘but’ carry content that does not fit neatly into the traditional distinction between expressed and implicated meanings. This content is often abstract, it’s meta-linguistic, and it’s hard to describe: indeed, there’s still a messy debate about what sort of dimension of meaning ‘but’ actually carries. Yet anecdotally at least, learning to use these words does not appear to present much of a challenge for children: At least by the age of three, they not only say the word ‘but’ frequently, they use it appropriately, too. Here, however, I’ll present data that this early competence at production masks a striking difficulty at interpreting its meaning during comprehension. Experiments with both preschoolers and statistical language models suggest that these failures to comprehend ‘but’ arise from a difficulty inferring the concrete implications of a Question Under Discussion. Children’s struggles with ‘but’ may thus be part of a broader difficulty generating alternatives, with implications for our understanding of children’s semantic and pragmatic interpretation.