Knowledge Bank

This research examines the presence of the quantifier “some” in English speech. Past research indicates that both semantics and pragmatics, or the context of the situation dictate the meaning of the word. With this particular quantifier it is important to identify the variations in pitch accent that will be controlled for within this experiment. The first vowel-reduced sm implies an existential or “logical” interpretation of the implicature. This can be interpreted as a “some and maybe all” meaning. Another, spoken with a L+H* pitch accent, SOME, has a pragmatically influenced “some, but not all” implicature. The final variation, some, holds an intermediate status, has a full vowel, unlike sm, but lacks a pitch accent, like SOME, and may or may not occur with an implicature. Our question that does not appear to have been asked before is what happens when an existential quantifier, such as some, marked with a L+H* pitch accent, occurs in an implicature-cancelling downward-entailing environment, such as the antecedent of a conditional sentence. Does the grammatical context “win” and cancel the implicature, or does the prosodic contour “win” and generate the implicature? Further, given the knowledge that preschool children pay attention to an implicatures duration rather than pitch, at which age do children become adult like? To answer this question we used a Truth Value Judgment Task in a between-subjects design with six groups (3 groups of adults, n=113 ; and 3 groups of children n=92 , age range=4;0–8;8, mean age=71 months, SD=12.39 months). Tentative conclusions are that adult interpretations are influenced by both pitch accent and grammatical context. Children appear to largely disregard pitch and attend to duration.