Universal Dependencies - English - GUM

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4. Discussion.

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We hypothesized that the children, who were over the age of six at the time of collection, would have adult-like SI interpretations.

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We expected that the use of a training session and then the format of the question would guide participants towards evaluating pragmatic felicity over providing truth value judgments, and would result in adult-like interpretations.

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Further, we posited that if our initial hypothesis was not supported, and in fact there was some non-adult-like performance, that there would be significant variability among the conditions, with cardinal numbers having the highest performance and some the weakest.

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On the surface, it does seem as if there is variability and perhaps a larger sample size or more items could lead to a significant finding (see limitations below), but at least for this study, the only significant finding was the difference between cardinal numbers and some.

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Significant differences were not observed between all and cardinal numbers or all and some.

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4.1. LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS.

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This study is limited in its power and generalizability.

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It serves as a reminder of the work that needs to be completed for the cross-linguistic study of SI in particular and acquisition more generally.

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Bantu languages are not included in studies of acquisition often enough despite the numerous languages in this linguistic grouping and the millions of people using them.

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Future studies need to include more participants and more items to increase power.

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Future studies should also include a larger age range of children to document the age at which adult-like performance emerges.

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Related cross-cultural studies have resulted in insufficient statistical power, but interesting trends (e.g., Nedwick, 2014).

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Follow-up studies with increased stimuli and participants are needed.

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In a future study, it is also important to consider if additional training in the difference between reporting on felicity and truth value judgments would impact results, or if more naturalistic experimental conditions (e.g., demonstrating actions using real objects instead of two-dimensional depictions) would be beneficial.

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Previous studies in this region of sub-Saharan Africa have found evidence of cultural differences in testing behavior (Hein, Reich, Marks, Thuma, & Grigorenko, 2016).

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The current study is too small to make strong conclusions with regard to cultural differences and experimental methods;

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however, in the study by Hein and colleagues it was found that children responded more or less frequently based on factors such as stimuli type.

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In the current study, the responses from two children were not included because they responded the same way to every item through the training and all test items.

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More specifically, they answered “yes” that the puppet described the pictures well.

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It is possible that these two children understood the task and really did believe that the puppet did not produce any poor descriptions, and in this regard, are not yet adult-like in their SI interpretations.

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This is unlikely as they said that even the first training item was said well.

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It is also possible though that these two children were attempting to please the data collectors, or be polite, and that “yes” was in some ways a default answer to be provided when having to respond verbally in a test context.

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Additional training with the methodology could improve outcomes.

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The puppets used were picked specifically for this task with careful attention to their appearance.

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Upon arrival at the school, however, it became clear that the children were not accustomed to playing with puppets and that the data collection would be a novel experience for them.

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Further exploration with greater cardinal number ranges could also prove interesting.

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Numbers through five in the participating communities are most often expressed with native Chitonga words while numbers greater than five are typically indicated using English borrowings.

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The cardinal numbers included in this study were only one through five in order to avoid additional item variability, but larger numbers should be included in future research.

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5. Conclusion.

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Albeit limited, these results provide valuable insight into SI interpretation by Chitonga-speaking children and demonstrate that pragmatic inference acquisition likely follows the order identified in previous research, but appears to be completed at a later age in this language.

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This interesting combination of findings – expected hierarchy of difficulty, but differing age of acquisition – is an important addition to our growing cross-linguistic knowledge of SI and could be the result of language-specific differences in the use of SI lexical items or methodological differences.