This precludes participants from making the kind of comments that we elicited. Second, excluding indirect responses, we are left with a rate of 88% correct responses to underinformative utterances with scalar expressions, comparable to the 83% reported by Guasti et al. (2005, experiment 4) and the 93% reported by Papafragou

and Musolino (2003, experiment 1)2. This dispels any concerns that our task elicited fewer categorical rejections from the adults than other tried-and-tested paradigms. Instead, our task design has elicited relevant additional data: even when adults do not categorically reject underinformative utterances, they are not oblivious to pragmatic infelicity, and their responses to underinformative utterances reflect this. Children performed significantly better when the correct response depended exclusively on the logical meaning of scalar and non-scalar expressions than when it Screening Library solubility dmso also depended on informativeness. In the latter case, but not the former, they also performed worse than the adults. This is exactly the picture

documented in previous studies which has been interpreted as evidence that children lack some aspect of pragmatic competence. However, we propose an alternative explanation for children’s acceptance of underinformative utterances, namely that children are tolerant of pragmatic infelicity in binary judgment tasks. To test this claim directly, in the following experiment we give participants a ternary judgment task. If children are not sensitive to violations of informativeness, they should assign the same rating to underinformative and optimal utterances. Idelalisib However, if children are sensitive to informativeness and also tolerant of violations of informativeness they should consistently choose the middle ifenprodil value for underinformative utterances, reserving the highest and lowest value for optimal (true and informative) and false utterances respectively. Exactly the same items and scenarios were used as in experiment 1. However, instead of judging whether Mr. Caveman’s

response was right or wrong, participants were asked to reward his response using a 3-point scale consisting of different-sized strawberries. These strawberries are introduced as Mr. Caveman’s ‘favourite food’, and are depicted visually in a horizontal line on printed paper, with the smallest on the left and the biggest on the right, each strawberry being twice the size of the previous one. Each point in the scale was explicitly introduced with its label, ‘the small strawberry’, ‘the big strawberry’ and ‘the huge strawberry’. Previous studies in our lab (Katsos & Smith, 2010) using an earlier version of this task revealed that children of this age can give judgements using 5-point Likert-scales, so we did not administer training or special instructions on how to use this 3-point scale.