Pragmatic Competence: Three-Year-Olds' Ability to Compute Conversational Implicatures

Preschoolers typically fail to compute the inference 'some implies ‘not all’'. This scalar implicature (SI) is challenging because it requires scale-specific knowledge, and modeling the knowledge states of others. We ask whether knowledge of scalar alternatives and ability to model the knowledge-states of others shape preschoolers’ ability to compute SI’s.