The Development of Quantity Implicatures in Mandarin-Speaking Children

The present study reports a large, cross-sectional study of Mandarin-speaking children’s ability to compute pragmatic inference. To chart the developmental trajectory of this pragmatic ability, we tested 225 Mandarin-speaking children (aged 4-8 years) on three types of pragmatic implicatures: scalar, context-dependent, and numeral implicatures. The results show that scalar implicatures posed difficulties for young Mandarin-speaking children, and they did not exhibit a consistent success until age 6. In contrast, by four years of age, this group was already able to compute context-dependent and numeral implicatures in an adult-like fashion. The implications of the current findings are discussed concerning children’s development of pragmatic inference as well as the relevance of cross-linguistic data in understanding pragmatic development.