Title: How children discover the difference between know and think

Abstract: Linguistic input is not directly intended to support language acquisition, but instead comes from ordinary conversations where speakers try to achieve practical goals. Despite this, children make rapid progress with word learning, managing to strip away layers of contextual information to discern subtle semantic distinctions. This talk examines how children discover the factivity contrast between know and think: know can only be fairly used when the speaker takes for granted the truth of the complement, while think has no such restriction. When do children discover this contrast? And more importantly how do they do so? I’ll present a line of work suggesting that the input does not directly reveal this factivity contrast, and furthermore that children may infer the distinction from indirect but correlated cues in the syntactic distributions of the two verbs & in the range of discourse moves that speakers use them to achieve. This more indirect pathway to the contrast is supported by principled connections across the interfaces, providing insight into the constraints on meaning that may guide language acquisition.

Location: Public Affairs 2214