Linguistic origins of uniquely human abstract concepts

Prof. David Barner will be visiting DEC as an invited scholar in June and July. More specifically, he will be at DEC from June 17 to June 21, and then again from July 1 to July 13.

Two talks have been scheduled during his stay:

1. LINGUAE seminar, June 20, 11h30-13h00
   Alternatives and exhaustification in language acquisition
2. LSCP language team meeting, July 9, 14h-15h30
   Linguistic origins of uniquely human abstract concepts

A third session will be organized, based on presentations of work in progress relevant to Prof. Barner's research by DEC members, esp. PhD students.

Prof. Barner will be of course more than happy to meet with faculty and students during his stay.

LINGUAE seminar, Thur. June 20, 11h30-13h00, salle Ribot
Title: Alternatives and exhaustification in language acquisition

Abstract: Though children begin to use logical connectives and quantifiers earlier in acquisition, studies in both linguistics and psychology have documented surprising failures in children's interpretation of expressions. Early accounts, beginning with Piaget, ascribed these failures to children's still burgeoning semantic and conceptual representations, arguing that children acquire ever more powerful logical resources as they development and acquire language. But more recent accounts, drawing on a Gricean divide between semantics and pragmatics, have argued that certain of these failures might not reflect semantic incompetence, but instead changes in children's pragmatic reasoning abilities. In particular, early studies argued that children might be more "logical" than adults, perhaps because of difficulties with Gricean reasoning, or theory of mind. In this talk, I investigate this question, and argue that neither pragmatic incompetence nor conceptual/semantic change can explain children's behaviors, and that instead children's judgments stem from difficulties with "access to alternatives".

First, I consider the case study of scalar implicature, and show that children when children hear an utterance like the one in (1) they fail to compute a scalar implicature like in (3) because they are unable to spontaneously generate the stronger alternative scale mate in (2). But when scalar alternatives are provided contextually or are "unique" alternatives, children no longer struggle with implicatures. I show that children easily compute "ad hoc" implicatures and ignorance implicatures (where all relevant alternatives are provided in the original utterances), as well as inferences that exhibit similar computational structure, like mutual exclusivity. Also, I show that children's problems cannot be ascribed to difficulties with epistemic (theory of mind) reasoning, ruling out the idea that their problems are related to understanding other minds and intentions.

(1) I ate some of the cake
(2) I ate all of the cake
(3) I ate some (but not all) of the cake

Having concluded that a non-Gricean model of implicature is mandated by previous data, I then attempt to assess some such approaches, including the multiple exhaustification hypothesis, which predicts, inter alia, that children should compute free choice inferences, but also, given a lack of access to alternatives (like conjunction), that they should treat disjunctive statements like (4) conjunctively.

(4) Every girl ate a cookie or a cake

I present a direct replication of this finding, and then show two experiments which argue that children's behaviors are not attributable to conjunctive meanings, but instead stem from problems of infelicity in the original experiments. I then present a follow-up experiment, using an entirely different paradigm, which again finds very few conjunctive children, but then provides independent evidence that these children's judgments are not consistent over time. I argue that, in fact, children generally don't compute any implicatures whatsoever, except for (1) free choice, and (2) the distributive inference. I note that because the multiple exhaustification account deploys the same mechanism for free choice inferences and disjunctive statements like in (4), something is amiss, and that an alternative account is needed. In particular, based on novel experimental evidence from children, I explore the possibility an inclusion account like Bar-Lev & Fox (2017) or Santorio & Romoli (2017).

LSCP Language team, Tue July 9, 14h-15h30, salle Ribot
Title: Linguistic origins of uniquely human abstract concepts

Abstract: Humans have a unique ability to organize experience via formal systems for measuring time, space, and number. Many such concepts - like minute, meter, or liter - rely on arbitrary divisions of phenomena using a system of exact numerical quantification, which first emerges in development in the form of number words (e.g., one, two, three, etc). Critically, large exact numerical representations like "57" are neither universal among humans nor easy to acquire in childhood, raising significant questions as to their cognitive origins, both developmentally and in human cultural history. In this talk, I explore one significant source of such representations: Natural language. In Part 1, I draw on evidence from six language groups, including French/English and Spanish/English bilinguals, to argue that children learn small number words using the same linguistic representations that support learning singular, dual, and plural representations in many of the world's languages. For example, I will argue that children's initial meaning for the word "one" is not unlike their meaning for "a". In Part 2, I investigate the idea that the logic of counting - and the intuition that numbers are infinite - also arises from a foundational property of language: Recursion. In particular, I will present a series of new studies from Cantonese, Hindi, Gujarati, English, and Slovenian. Some of these languages - like Cantonese and Slovenian - exhibit relatively transparent morphological rules in their counting systems, which may allow children to readily infer that number words - and therefore numbers - can be freely generated from rules, and therefore are infinite. Other languages, like Hindi and Gujarati, have highly opaque counting systems, and may make it harder for children to infer such rules. I conclude that the fundamental logical properties that support learning mathematics can also be found in natural language. I end by speculating about why number words are so difficult for children to acquire, and also why not all humans constructed count systems historically.