Caveman responds ‘The turtle played

with some of the balls’. Six of the stories testing logical truth and falsity made mention of the weaker term of the scale (‘some’ or single noun phrases) and six mentioned the stronger term of the scale (‘all’ or conjoined noun phrases). See Appendix A for the list of stories and utterances and Appendix B for a sample visual display of a scalar and non-scalar item. The task took between 15 and 25 min to administer and it was part of an experimental session that lasted around 30 min for adult participants selleck chemicals llc and 45 min for children. The session also involved two selection measures for the children, a non-verbal IQ test (Raven’s Coloured Matrices; Raven, Raven, & Court, 1998) and a sentence-repetition task from the NEPSY battery (Korkman, Kirk, & Kemp, 1999). In this and all subsequent experiments reported in this paper, any child falling below 1.25 standard deviations from the age-appropriate mean for the non-verbal IQ test and/or the sentence-repetition task was removed from the sample and replaced. The experiments took place in a relatively quiet room in the children’s school, or at the university for adults. The participants were 20 5- to 6-year-old English-speaking children (mean age 5;6, range 5;1–6;2) recruited

from primary schools in Cambridge, UK, and 20 adults, students of the University of Cambridge (mean age 23;8, range 20;1–30;3). Two children did not meet the criteria for the selection tasks and were replaced. All the child responses were straightforward ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ responses, and were scored as correct or incorrect for the critical and Etoposide order control items. All the adult responses to the logically false and the optimal conditions were also ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. For the underinformative utterances, a range of responses was elicited from the adults, including revisions of the original utterances and meta-linguistic comments. In the main analysis we Quisqualic acid classified all adult responses that were a straightforward

‘yes’ or ‘right’ as incorrect, on the grounds that the participant did not object to the infelicity. We classified all other responses as correct, regardless of whether the response came as a straightforward rejection, or a more indirect objection, as in any case participants had detected that Mr. Caveman’s utterance was not a perfectly felicitous answer to the question. We also performed a second analysis where we took into account how many of the informative responses came in the form of a straightforward rejection or in an indirect objection. When participants gave a response other than a straightforward ‘yes’ or ‘right’ and did not spontaneously explain why they gave this response, the experimenter prompted them for an explanation. All participants were able to answer informatively with reference to the appropriate scale e.g. ‘because [the mouse] picked up all the carrots’, ‘because [Mr. Caveman] said some’.