Search for: All records

We report a study examining developmental changes in perceptions of disagreements among speakers who use generics to describe contextually-restricted or unrestricted regularities. Participants (65 adults and 222 5-12-year-olds) reacted to generic claims from two speakers who attributed ostensibly contradictory properties to a biological kind (e.g. “Xs are striped” and “Xs are spotted”). Crucially, we manipulated the scope of each speaker’s claim, or its contextual restriction: whether they made a claim restricted to a specific context (island habitat), or an unrestricted claim. Participants were asked whether the speakers could “both be right” (faultless disagreement rating). Adults were sensitive to contextual restriction: they allowed for faultless disagreement when contextual restrictions mis-aligned (with additional differentiation among experimental conditions described below), and denied it when both speakers restricted to the same context. Young children demonstrated striking partial competence in faultless disagreement judgments much earlier than prior developmental literature suggested; however, their response pattern was not quite adult-like. This is the first study to document faultless disagreement between differentially restricted generics, both in adults and in children, and to start mapping developmental changes in this capacity. We discuss the developmental trajectory, and implications for social functioning and learning, and draw connections to semantic theories.