Child Language Development

This study investigated the developmental trajectory of Scalar Implicature (SI) comprehension in monolingual Persian-speaking children, examining how linguistic typology, contextual support, and cognitive abilities influence this process in a Subject-Object-Verb language. 60 children divided into 2 age groups (4-5 and 6-7 years), along with 20 adults, participated in a Statement Evaluation Task involving the quantifier "some" ("ba'zi"). The task was designed to evaluate whether participants interpreted "some" as "some but not all" in scenarios where the alternative "all" is true with two contextual conditions: Basic and Enriched, the latter increasing the salience of the "all" alternative. Standardized assessments of Working Memory (WM) and Theory of Mind (ToM) were also administered to explore cognitive correlates. Results showed a significant main effect of Age Group; older children demonstrated higher SI rates (mean=0.61) than younger children (mean=0.35), indicating a developmental increase in pragmatic competence. Moreover, contextual enrichment significantly enhanced SI rates overall, with older children benefiting more notably as evidenced by a significant interaction between age and context. Correlational analyses revealed that WM capacity (Backward Digit Span) was associated with SI performance in the Basic Context, whereas ToM scores correlated with SI rates in the Enriched Context, suggesting dissociable cognitive mechanisms underpin SI comprehension depending on contextual complexity. These findings supported a universal developmental progression from logical to pragmatic interpretations of scalar terms in Persian-speaking children, emphasizing the roles of WM and ToM in the emergence of pragmatic inference. Overall, the study highlighted how contextual cues and cognitive resources differentially facilitate SI understanding, lending support to resource-dependent models of pragmatic development.