The effect of guided play on linguistic skills: from the psycholinguistics laboratory to the classroom

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Much of the information exchanged in discourse is unsaid, and it is widely assumed in linguistics thatspeakers and listeners appeal to mutually assumed, socially oriented strategies to interpret theunspoken (e.g., Grice, 1975; Sperber & Wilson, 1986; Frank & Goodman, 2012). While adults showa robust command of such strategies, it is unclear whether children infer the whole range of unsaidmeanings that adults do, and if so, whether they use the same strategies to retrieve and interpret theunsaid; while the former is important for theories of developmental psychology, the latter hasramifications for linguistic theories that must account for the interpretative strategies that children andadults use. My proposed investigation will focus on one type of unsaid inference, quantityimplicature, a well-studied phenomenon that relies on the listener's recovery of the unsaid (see (1)below and Wilson & Katsos (2020) for an overview).I will appeal to theoretically-'thin' models of communication that have been developed to explain thecommunicative competence of people with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism (Andrés Roqueta & Katsos, 201, 2020; Kissine, 2016) but have not yet been employed to explain neurotypicalchild competence. Methodologically, I will use controlled psycholinguistic experimentation to test thepredictions of these models using young neurotypical children. A methodological innovation will beto use guided play-based paradigms to reveal the unadulterated capacity of a child's inferential skills.This is a novel approach in the discipline and is a promising alternative to existing paradigms (e.g.Wilson & Katsos, 2020) that have been criticised for lacking motivation or relevance from the child'sperspective