Role of Theory of Mind in children’s derivation of ad hoc conversational implicatures

Previous literature suggests that four-year-old children can derive ad hoc scalar implicatures, but it remains unclear whether they do so by taking into account the speaker’s perspective. This research investigated this issue by testing children’s ability to derive ad hoc implicatures in conditions in which the speaker had either a false or a true belief about relevant aspects of the communicative context. The participants were typically developing four-, five-, and six-year-olds and a group of adults. Although performance improved with age, all children struggled in the false belief condition, suggesting that they did not take the speaker’s perspective into account when they derived ad hoc implicatures.