Strong and Weak Readings in the Domain of Worlds: A Negative Polar Modal and Children's Scope Assignment

This study investigates children's interpretation of sentences with two logical operators: Dutch universal modal hoeven and negation (niet). In adult Dutch, hoeven is an NPI that necessarily scopes under negation, giving rise to a NOT > NECESSARY reading. The findings from a hidden-object task with 5- and 6-year-old children showed that children's performance is suggestive of an interpretation of sentences with hoeft niet in which the modal scopes over negation (NECESSARY > NOT). This is in line with the Semantic Subset Principle that dictates that children should opt for the strongest possible reading in case of potential scope ambiguities. The full pattern of results, however, seems to be determined, in addition, by a particular strategy children use when facing uncertainty called Premature Closure.

Children's on-line processing of epistemic modals

In this paper we investigated the real-time processing of epistemic modals in five-year-olds. In a simple reasoning scenario, we monitored children's eye-movements while processing a sentence with modal expressions of different force (might/must). Children were also asked to judge the truth-value of the target sentences at the end of the reasoning task. Consistent with previous findings (Noveck, 2001), we found that children's behavioural responses were much less accurate compared to adults. Their eye-movements, however, revealed that children did not treat the two modal expressions alike. As soon as a modal expression was presented, children and adults showed a similar fixation pattern that varied as a function of the modal expression they heard. It is only at the very end of the sentence that children's fixations diverged from the adult ones. We discuss these findings in relation to the proposal that children narrow down the set of possible outcomes in undetermined reasoning scenarios and endorse only one possibility among several (Acredolo & Horobin, 1987, Ozturk & Papafragou, 2015).

Deductive Reasoning with Prose Passages: Effects of Age, Inference Form, Prior Knowledge, and Reading Skill

This study applied knowledge about inference-making from the deductive reasoning literature to the drawing of specific inferences from prose passages. It explored the effects of age, inference form, prior knowledge, and reading skill on inferential comprehension. In Experiment 1, fourth-grade, seventh-grade, and college students read three prose passages, each containing six inferential questions based on premises expressed in the passages. Premise information was either true, false, or neutral with regard to subjects’ prior knowledge. To answer the questions correctly, subjects were required to make deductive inferences with six different inference forms. Content (true, false, or neutral) and form interacted differently depending on the age of subjects, but content affected performance with at least some forms for all age groups. When reasoning with conditional forms, subjects’ use of more advanced reasoning patterns with true content decreased with false and neutral content, where less advanced reasoning patterns were shown. In Experiment 2, the relationships among reading skill, inference form, and content were explored with seventh-grade and college students. For college students, reading skill had a positive main effect, but did not interact with form or content. For seventh-graders, skilled readers were better able than less skilled readers to reason from false and neutral premises with determinate inference forms.

Children's Failure to Make Judgements of Undecidability when they are Ignorant

In five investigations we tested 5 to 7-year-olds' ability to make appropriate judgements of "undecidable". Children pointed at the picture they thought might be a named familiar or unfamiliar cartoon character from a set of 5, and were asked if they knew or didn't know their chosen picture was the target. Judgements about familiar targets were accurate, but children often failed to make correct "don't know" judgements ("undecidable") about unfamiliar targets. This was not simply because children felt "don't know" was too negative an expression, given that their chosen picture might have been the target, since varying the wording had little effect: "just think" and "just hope" contrasted with "know"; "hard" contrasted with "easy"; "don't know" contrasted with "is it [target name] or isn't it". Further results showed that children were not simply avoiding loss of face caused by admitting to ignorance, nor were they simply committed to their chosen picture. Finally, asking children if they had ever heard of the target before, increased the likelihood of their subsequently making correct "undecidable" judgements. We discuss why "undecidable" judgements might be difficult for children to make, and why alerting them to lack of past experience via their correct judgements of "never heard of.." was beneficial to their making correct judgements of "undecidable".

Escape from metaignorance: how children develop an understanding of their own lack of knowledge

Previous research yielded conflicting results about when children can accurately assess their epistemic states in different hiding tasks. In Experiment 1, ninety-two 3- to 7-year-olds were either shown which object was hidden inside a box, were totally ignorant about what it could be, or were presented with two objects one of which was being put inside (partial exposure). Even 3-year-olds could assess their epistemic states in the total ignorance and the complete knowledge task. However, only children older than 5 could assess their ignorance in the partial exposure task. In Experiment 2 with one hundred and one 3- to 7-year-olds, similar results were found for children under 5 years even when more objects were shown in partial exposure tasks. Implications for children's developing theory of knowledge are discussed.

Can children resist making interpretations when uncertain?

In two experiments, we examined young children's ability to delay a response to ambiguous input. In Experiment 1, 5- and 6-year-olds performed as poorly when they needed to choose between basing an interpretation on ambiguous input and delaying an interpretation as when making explicit evaluations of knowledge, whereas 7- and 8-year-olds found the former task easy. In Experiment 2, 5- and 6-year-olds performed well on a task that required delaying a response but removed the need to decide between strategies. We discuss children's difficulty with ambiguity in terms of the decision-making demands made by different procedures. These demands appear to cause particular problems for young children.

Overcoming the Positive-Capture Strategy in Young Children: Learning About Indeterminacy

Two experiments were conducted to examine whether and how 4- and 5-year-olds learn to distinguish determinate from indeterminate evidence. Children were asked to decide whether various patterns of evidence were sufficient to reach unambiguous conclusions. This study replicated the finding that young children tend to use a strategy that, although generally successful, fails on evidence patterns in which a single positive instance co-occurs with an unexplored source of evidence. Experiment 1 demonstrated that this positive-capture strategy is deeply entrenched, even in a meaningful, pragmatic context. With a microgenetic design, Experiment 2 revealed that young children are capable of replacing the positive-capture strategy with a correct strategy when they are exposed to various analogous tasks in several training sessions.

Children's understanding that utterances emanate from minds: using speaker belief to aid interpretation

Children interpreted an utterance made by a protagonist with a false belief, such as, 'I would like the car in the garage.' Calculating the speaker's belief in conjunction with the literal meaning of the utterance would lead to the correct interpretation that the intended referent is the car on the track, given that the car in the garage swapped places with the one on the track. In Experiments 1 and 2, many children aged around 4 and 5 years wrongly indicated the car in the garage. In contrast, many correctly indicated the car on the track when it was unnecessary to consider the speaker's belief because the utterance was, 'the car I put in the garage'. Six-year-olds found both kinds of utterance equally easy in Experiment 1, while 3-year-olds had equal difficulty with both. In Experiments 2 and 3, the speaker gave an ambiguous utterance and many children aged between 3 and 6 years successfully used information about the speaker's belief to identify which of several candidate referents was intended. We discuss the results in relation to characteristics of utterance comprehension and consider implications for developments in understanding the mind by children beyond 4 years.