Alternatives and competition in language are pervasive at all levels of linguistic analysis.
More specifically, alternatives have been argued to play a prominent role in an ever-growing …

Spectacular progress in the information processing sciences (machine learning, wearable
sensors) promises to revolutionize the study of cognitive development. Here, we analyse the …

Utterances such as “Megan ate some of the cupcakes” are often interpreted as “Megan ate
some but not all of the cupcakes”. Such an interpretation is thought to arise from a pragmatic …

Human communication requires impressive inferential abilities and mind-reading skills. To
learn how to speak and become competent communicators children need both. The …

If a speaker tells us that “some guests were late to the party,” we typically infer that not all
were. Implicatures, in which an ambiguous statement (“some and possibly all”) is …

Recent experimental research has observed two kinds of priming effects on quantity
implicatures. One is the Strong–Weak contrast, where more quantity implicatures are …

The ability to evaluate “sins of omission”—true but pragmatically misleading,
underinformative pedagogy—is critical for learning. This study reveals a developmental …

Language acquisition is a complex phenomenon in which internal and external factors
inevitably interact in complex ways. Our point of departure is an approach to the study of the …

Effective communication requires knowing the “right” amount of information to provide; what
is necessary for a naïve learner to arrive at a target hypothesis may be superfluous and …

Abstract (for Part I and Part II) There has been a recent 'experimental turn'in the study of
scalar implicature, yielding important results concerning online processing and acquisition …