CHILDREN'S KNOWLEDGE OF NON-TRUTH-CONDITIONAL CONVENTIONAL MEANING:

EVIDENCE FROM THE CONTRASTIVE ELEMENT OF AVAL ('BUT')

LEAH PALTIEL-GEDALYOVICH

Abstract

Proceedings of IATL 17
Six adults and twenty children participated in a study in progress into adult and child knowledge of the non-truth-conditional contrastive meaning associated with aval (Hebrew, 'but'). As predicted, children approached adult-like performance on truth-conditional tasks, rejecting a puppet's false description of pictures using coordinated sentences. However, when the children were presented pictures described by true, non-contrastive sentences coordinated by aval, they accepted these descriptions. The adults consistently rejected true non-contrastive descriptions using aval. These results support the theoretical distincion between truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning. The early knowledge of truth-conditional meaning suggests that this knowledge is part of Universal Grammar. The later development of the non-truth-conditional meaning is explained as a result of non-linguistic factors, either pragmatic factors within the language apparatus but outside the grammar, or general cognitive capacities outside the language apparatus. These explanations relate back directly to theoretical analyses of the truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning components of aval.


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