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Children's Use of Syntactic and Pragmatic Knowledge in the Interpretation of Novel Adjectives
Author(s) -
Diesendruck Gil,
Hall D. Geoffrey,
Graham Susan A.
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00853.x
Subject(s) - adjective , referent , psychology , noun , linguistics , syntax , object (grammar) , philosophy
In Study 1, English‐speaking 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds heard a novel adjective used to label one of two objects and were asked for the referent of a different novel adjective. Children were more likely to select the unlabeled object if the two adjectives appeared prenominally (e.g., “a very DAXY dog”) than as predicates (e.g., “a dog that is very DAXY”). Study 2 revealed that this response occurred only when both adjectives were prenominal. Study 3 replicated Study 1 with Hebrew‐speaking 3‐ and 4–year‐olds, even though in Hebrew both types of adjectives appear postnominally. Preschoolers understand that prenominal adjectives imply a restriction of the reference of nouns, and this knowledge motivates a contrastive pragmatic inference regarding the referents of different prenominal adjectives.