Abstract
In three experiments, we investigated the effect of age, task, task content and working memory (WM) on scalar implicature processing. We found that three-year-olds still often interpret the scalar term ‘some’ logically (some being compatible with all), but five-year-olds and especially seven-year-olds are highly competent pragmatic reasoners. Additionally we found that not only the nature of the task but also the specific task content influences the number of pragmatic answers: an Action-Based-Task (ABT) leads to more pragmatic answers than a metalinguistic Truth-Value Judgment Task (TVJT) that, in turn, leads to more pragmatic answers than a different TVJT that includes more cognitive content. Finally, we found no effect of WM in both five-year-olds and seven-year-olds. Children with a high WM capacity did not provide significantly more pragmatic answers than children with a low WM capacity.