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

Much of the information exchanged in discourse is unsaid, and it is widely assumed in linguistics that
speakers and listeners appeal to mutually assumed, socially oriented strategies to interpret the
unspoken (e.g., Grice, 1975; Sperber & Wilson, 1986; Frank & Goodman, 2012). While adults show
a robust command of such strategies, it is unclear whether children infer the whole range of unsaid
meanings that adults do, and if so, whether they use the same strategies to retrieve and interpret the
unsaid; while the former is important for theories of developmental psychology, the latter has
ramifications for linguistic theories that must account for the interpretative strategies that children and
adults use. My proposed investigation will focus on one type of unsaid inference, quantity
implicature, 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 the
communicative competence of people with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism (Andrés Roqueta & Katsos, 201, 2020; Kissine, 2016) but have not yet been employed to explain neurotypical
child competence. Methodologically, I will use controlled psycholinguistic experimentation to test the
predictions of these models using young neurotypical children. A methodological innovation will be
to 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's
perspective