Research On The Effect Of Information Prominence On Scalar Implicature Reasoning

Scalar Implicature is the implicit meaning derived by using vocabulary with different information intensity and pragmatic principles.For example,in the face of the statement that "some students are in the classroom",it can be inferred that the sentence "all students in the classroom" that contains more informative word does not hold.As an important interface of connecting semantics and pragmatics,the acquisition process of Scalar Implicature shows the development track of children’s logical semantics and pragmatic competence.Studies have shown that,unlike adults,children usually have difficulties in reasoning about Scalar Implicature,and their reasoning performance can be affected by various factors such as experimental tasks,alternatives,etc.However,no experiments have found whether they will be affected by information prominence factors.Discourse focus and discourse hierarchy are main ways of highlighting information: the former uses explicit phonetic,vocabulary or syntactic means to highlight the important content,and the latter highlights the key information implicitly by the hierarchical structure of the various parts of the discourse.Generally,the information marked by the focus is more important than the non-focus information;and compared with the low-level,the information conveyed at the high-level also needs to be paid more attention.420 children aged 5-7-years-old whose mother tongue is Chinese were recruited as experimental subjects.In the behavioral experiment adopted Picture-to-Sentence paradigm,the Chinese quantifier "some" was used as the trigger word for the Scalar Implicature,and the discourse focus and the discourse hierarchy were used as variable factors.By setting question sentences and clause hierarchical relationship,the study controlled whether "some" is in the focus or high-level position of the sentence or not,so as to explore whether the two information prominence methods will promote the reasoning of children’s Scalar Implicature.At the same time,in order to better understand whether children’s performance of all ages are similar to adults under the effect of different variable factors,another 140 adult subjects were recruited to conduct a comparative analysis on the experimental results of the two groups.Finally,the study obtained the conclusions as follows:A.Information prominence influenced Scalar Implicature reasoning.Both explicit discourse focus and implicit discourse high hierarchy promoted the level of Scalar Implicature.But there was no obvious interaction between them.B.The reasoning mechanism of Scalar Implicature accorded with the hypothesis of Context-Driven View.The reasoning of Scalar Implicature depended on the need of contextual relevance,and the semantic meaning of trigger word was interpreted before pragmatic meaning.The Scalar Implicature reasoning was influenced by various semantic and grammatical factors in context.C.Scalar Implicature was restricted by age factors.Children’s reasoning ability to Scalar Implicature improved with age.But until the age of 7,there was still a big gap between children and adults.