Counting piglets: who cares if two is less than three?

1. Counting piglets: who cares if two is less than three? Aniela Improta França* Miriam Lemle* Maurício Cagy** Antonio Fernando Catelli Infantosi*** Biolinguistic Investigations Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic February 23-25, 2007 * Linguistics Department / Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil** Epidemiology and Biostatistics Department/ UFF- Federal Fluminense University, Brazil *** Biomedical Engineering Program / Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

2. Yes! No! Scalar Implicature The sow is nursing two piglets Reinhart, (1999) Chierchia, (2000) Noveck, (2001) Musolino, (2004)

3. Language development involves three factors (Chomsky, 2005): • Genetic Endowment • Experience • Principles not specific to the faculty of language ? What about Scalar Implicature

4. In a sentential derivation, when do we compute scalar implicature? Noveck, (2001) Musolino, (2004) • Standard View Syntactic Computation Pragmatics Chierchia, (2000) Reinhart, (1999) • Semantic Core Model Syntax LF Scalar Implicatures • Phase by phase interspersed with syntax • Affected by downward entailment • Affected by memory resources

5. Psycholinguistic investigation:Testing 3, 4 , 5 and 6 year-olds* Meet the brothers Wacko and Walter. Walter is an ordinary kid. But Wacko is kind of crazy. He likes to say funny things. For example, I asked Walter what food he liked best and he said it was pizza. Then I asked Wacko, and he said it was sardine sundae! The other day I had a lot of fun looking at some pictures with Walter and Wacko. They said lots of things about the pictures. Now let’s play a guessing game. I will tell you things that they said to me when they looked at the pictures and you will guess if it was Walter or Wacko who said those things. • Pragmatically • adjusted • 10 tokens • Congruous Fillers • 10 tokens Scalar implicature 20 tokens • Larger number • 20 tokens • Incongruous Fillers • 20 tokens *CNPq (National Research Council) grant

6. Balancing stimuli in the SI group Congruous fillers - expected to yield references to Walter Incongruous fillers - expected to yield references to Wacko Pragmatically adjusted - expected to yield references to Walter Larger number - expected to yield references to Wacko Scalar Implicature - expected to yield references to Walter Now, extracting just the scalar implicature ones

7. Volunteers • 24 children completed the test • 6 per target age • 3 boys / 3 girls • 11 children did not complete or engage in the test

8. Results P= 0,6 Percentage of judgment deviations from adult standards per age, per type of cognition FRANÇA, A. I. O processamento de concatenações lingüísticas na aquisição. In: Revista Letra UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, v. 1, n. 1, p. 9-28, 1806-5333, Ed. Faculdade de Letras, 2004 Scalar Implicature

9. Percentage of application of scalar implicature per age Conclusion: Despite the fact that children had a good performance on controls, for instance by massively rejecting higher-than-real values, until the age of 6 children equally accept all downward values. Is the Gricean Law of Informativeness acquired later on? (Pragmatic View) or Is there a computational cost related to applying Scalar Implicatures? (Structural View)

10. Now, the adults: the ERP experiment • Twenty-nine adults (15 males) • While monitored by an EEG, each volunteer looked at a picture for 2000 ms. • Then a sentence describing the scene in the picture started appearing on the screen word by word. • Each sentence had five words. • Each word was on for 200ms. • In 50% of cases, the quantities were adjusted to describe the total quantity of items • In 50%, quantities were smaller than the exact total.

11. Results

12. Results Wilcoxon test (non-parametric) was applied to amplitudes and latencies: • N400: Overlapping (statistically irrelevant) for all derivations • N600: Derivations in which the amplitude of the wave related to the sentence with incongruous number was meaningfully higher than that of sentence related to the congruous number Cz Pz P4 C4 C3 • N600 Derivations in which the latency of the pragmatically congruous was meaningfully longer than that of the incongruous Fz Cz Pz C4 P4 C3 P3 F3

13. What else do we know about electrical responses to linguistic stimuli? trigger The boy atela sandwich The boy atelasandal FRANCA, A. I. ; et alii (2004) trigger The boy kickedlthe ball The chair kicked l the ball LAGE, A. C. ( 2005)

14. Artificially aligning the three experiments Experiment 1 The boy ate a sandal. Verb-object integration: 375ms Experiment 2 The chair kicked the ball. Subject-vP integration: 670ms Experiment 3 The sow is nursing two piglets. Cardinality Judgment: 560ms

15. Aspect P Aspect’ Cause P Cause’ Asp dP d nP the sow The sow is nursing two piglets ing vP v’ RootPhrase cardinality congruence v dP nurse d nP two two piglets

16. TP T’ CP C’ T Aspect P T Aux Aspect’ pres be Cause P Cause’ Asp dP nP d the sowi The sow is nursing two piglets nursing vP ti v’ RootPhrase cardinality congruence v two dP d nP Electrophysiological consequence: The deeper the embedding, the shorter the wave latency. two two piglets

17. Yes! Scalar Implicature No! The sow is nursing two piglets

18. Conclusion: • Children get to the total number of items in the picture by literally counting and, in fact, if a person is counting, two is on the way to reach three. This explains why children accepted any number within the downward range. They had an array of potentially right answers activated in their minds; • Presumably, children’s method of accessing a number by counting is less costly for them than that used by adults, who access small numbers without counting and keep a record of the total in the working memory to be checked later against the number uttered by the experimenter; • As to the adults, the sequence of ERPs shows us that syntactic computations take place one after the other, depending on the depth of embedding; • There is more electrical activity (greater amplitude) connected to the processing of incongruous sentences in the scalar implicature series and also in the other tests used as comparisons; • Since cardinality checking seems to be computed earlier than subject integration, we propose that, in this syntactic structure tested, cardinality congruence between image and utterance happens at the vP phase. If this computation is to be called Pragmatics, then we can say that Pragmatics is interspersed with syntax, coming in right in the middle of the derivation, but in a principled way, at the vP phase border.

19. Language development involves three factors (Chomsky, 2005): ? • Genetic Endowment • Experience • Principles not specific to the faculty of language What about Scalar Implicature

20. What now? 1. ERP investigations of other types of scalar implicature both linguistically and pragmatically motivated

21. What now? 2. Playing with the Scalar Implicatures inserted in the subject position Two boys drive their carts.

22. What now? 3. Manipulating with Root vocabulary items in nPs (Encyclopedic knowledge) The dog chews some sticks.

23. Bibliography • Chierchia, G. (2004). Scalar implicatures, polarity phenomena and the syntax/pragmatic interface. In A. Beletti (Ed.), Structures and Beyond. Oxford University Press. • Ferreira, F. & Clifton, C. (1986). The independence of syntactic processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 25, 348-358. • FRANCA, A. I. ; CAGY, Maurício ; LEMLE, Miriam ; CONSTANT, Pedro ; INFANTOSI, Antonio Fernando Catelli . Discriminating among different types of verb-complement merge in Brazilian Portuguese: an ERP study of morpho-syntactic sub-processes. Journal of Neurolinguistics, Estados Unidos, v. 17, n. 6, p. 425-437, 2004. • FRANÇA, A. I. O processamento de concatenações lingüísticas na aquisição. In: Maria Cecilia de Magalhães Mollica. (Org.). A segunda Língua: aquisição e linguagem. Revista Letra UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, v. 1, n. 1, p. 9-28, 1806-5333, Ed. Faculdade de Letras, 2004 • Lage, A. C. . Concatenações do objeto e do sujeito em português e em alemão: conclusões de experimentos psicolingüísticos on-line.. Linguística Revista da Pós Graduação Em Linguistica da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, v. 1, n. 1, p. 81-108, 2005. • Katsos, N., Breheny, R., & Williams, J. (2005). Interaction of structural and contextual constraints during the on-line generation of scalar inferences. Proceedings of the 27thAnnual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. • Noveck, I. A. & A. Posada (2003). Characterising the time course of an implicature. Brain and Language, 85, 203-210. • Noveck, I. A. (2001). When children are more logical than adults: experimental investigation of scalar implicatures. Cognition, 78, 165-188. • Papafragou, A. & Musolino J. (2003). Scalar implicatures: experiments at the semantics/pragmatics interface. Cognition, 86, 253-282.