Caveman should have used a numeral (he should have said ‘…three of the fences’ rather than ‘…some of the fences’). This response was scored as incorrect. The experimenter then explained that Mr. Caveman does not use number words because he already knows them and he wants to learn other ways of saying things, using words like ‘some’ and ‘all’. After this explanation, the participant did not object again Raf inhibitor to the use of a quantifier instead of a numeral. Both children and adults were highly competent in the control conditions,

rejecting logically false utterances and accepting optimal (logically true and informative) ones at rates over 95%. The only two erroneous responses were elicited from one child rejecting one instance of a scalar expression in an optimal condition (as mentioned above), and another child rejecting one instance of a non-scalar expression in an optimal condition. Turning to responses to the critical underinformative utterances, all trans-isomer ic50 the adult responses were rejections or objections. However, the children rejected underinformative utterances at rates of only 29% (26% and 31% for scalar and non-scalar expressions respectively). Two Mann–Whitney U-tests reveal that the adults performed higher than the children in the underinformative

conditions for scalar and non-scalar expressions (both U > 4.95, p < .001, effect size r for non-parametric tests >.78; where >.10 may be considered a small effect, >.30 medium and >.50 large). Within the child group, further pairwise comparisons by Wilcoxon Signed Ranks tests reveal that children performed reliably higher in both the logically false and the optimal conditions compared to the underinformative condition, both for scalars and non-scalars (both W > 3.6, p < .001, r > .8, for false vs. underinformative; both W > 3.6, p < .001, r > .8

for optimal vs. underinformative respectively). Moreover, children’s performance did not significantly differ between scalar and non-scalar expressions in the underinformative condition (W = .84, p > .1). Moreover, the rates of rejection of underinformative utterances Bcl-w were reliably above what one would expect if there was no sensitivity to informativeness at all (=no rejections of underinformativeness: One-sample t-test, both t(19) > 3.1, p < .005, effect size Cohen’sd for parametric tests > .75). Let us also consider participant distribution to examine whether children are uniform in occasionally rejecting underinformative utterances, or whether they cluster in sub-groups. We classified children as consistently underinformative (rejecting 0–1 out of six underinformative utterances) or inconsistent (rejecting 2–4 out of six utterances) or consistently informative (rejecting 5–6 out of six utterances).