RT Journal Article
SR Electronic(1)
A1 Syrett, Kristen
A1 Austin, Jennifer
A1 Sanchez, Liliana
A1 Germak, Christina
A1 Lingwall, Anne
A1 Perez-Cortes, Silvia
A1 Arias-Amaya, Anthony
A1 Baker, Hannah
YR 2017
T1 The influence of conversational context and the developing lexicon on the calculation of scalar implicatures: Insights from Spanish-English bilingual children
JF Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
VO 7
IS 2
SP 230
OP 264
DO https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.14019.syr
PB John Benjamins
SN 1879-9264,
AB Although monolingual children do not generally calculate the upper-bounded scalar implicature (SI) associated with ‘some’ without additional support, monolingual Spanish-speaking children have been reported to do so with algunos (‘some’), and further distinguish algunos from unos. Given documented cross-linguistic influence in interface phenomena in bilinguals, we asked whether young Spanish-English bilinguals calculate SIs with algunos, or if there is an effect of acquiring languages with overlapping but diverging lexical entries. Two experiments reveal that not only do bilinguals inconsistently calculate SIs, Spanish monolinguals do not always either. In
Experiment 1
, bilinguals did not calculate the SI associated with algunos. However, in
Experiment 2
, which calls upon their awareness of speaker-hearer dynamics, they did. This research highlights the challenges arising from interpreting linguistic phenomena where lexical, semantic, and pragmatic information intersect, and is a call for further investigation with bilinguals in a rapidly growing area where bilingual research is lacking.,
UL https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/lab.14019.syr