Like many languages, European French has a contrapositive response option (Si) to reject the negative content of a question and to express accord with the questioner’s implicit affirmative. Consider the question “Barack does not eat meat?” (in French) where the response Si indicates that he does. Inspired by Gricean analyses, we view Si as an expression that includes a pragmatic component. Based on extant studies on pragmatic inference, we predicted that the Si response ought to appear cognitively costly compared to felicitous Oui and Non answers. We created an original task that enjoins a participant to remove a box’s cover (while searching for a candy) before hearing a puppet’s question. In the critical Negative-Si (NS) condition, the participant finds the candy in, say, a white box (when two boxes are under consideration) and the interlocutor-puppet’s negative question is It is not in the white box? Besides rates of accurate responses, our main dependent variable was Response Reaction Times (RRT’s), viz. the time to naturally voice an answer (Si in this case). Controls were the Affirmative-Oui (AO), Affirmative-Non (AN), and Negative-Non (NN) conditions. Importantly, the puppet began each trial with one of three kinds of prior belief, a) by declaring that the candy is surely in, or; b) surely not in, the to-be-presented box or; c) by saying “I don’t know where it is.” These were included to determine whether answerers consider the questioner’s prior epistemic state when responding. Experiment 1 compared 6-year-olds to adults and found that i) proficient uses of Si are costly with respect to the other three conditions and that; ii) answers in the wake of a “I don’t know where it is” prompt slowdowns when compared to the other two declarations. Both findings are consistent with our pre-registered predictions. Four-year-olds, investigated in Experiment 2, pattern almost identically with the 6-year-olds, with one major exception. Their fastest response occurs when answering Si, leading to a unique developmental effect. Our account for this finding is that four-year-olds rely on a minimally semantic representation of Si, which encodes disagreement between the negative content of the question and the facts. We propose that there are pragmatic processes intrinsic to Si – which ultimately signal agreement with the questioner’s implicit affirmative – and that mastering these requires greater maturity.

像许多语言一样，欧洲法语具有相反的回答选项（Si）来拒绝问题的否定内容并表达与提问者的隐含肯定性一致。考虑问题“巴拉克不吃肉吗？” （法文），其中Si表示他这样做。受Gricean分析的启发，我们将Si视为包含务实成分的表达。根据对务实推理的现有研究，我们预测，与适当的Oui和Non相比，Si反应在认知上应该代价高昂答案。我们创建了一个原始任务，该任务要求参与者在听到木偶的问题之前（在寻找糖果时）取下盒子的盖子。在关键的负硅（NS）条件下，参与者在一个白盒子中找到了糖果（例如，正在考虑两个盒子时），对话者-p的否定问题是“不是在白盒子中吗？”。除了准确的响应率外，我们的主要因变量是响应反应时间（RRT），即。时间自然语音应答（硅在这种情况下）。控件为“肯定”-“ Oui”（AO），“肯定-非”（AN）和“否定-非”（NN）条件。重要的是，木偶以以下三种先验信念中的一种开始了每个试验：a）声明糖果肯定在里面；或者；b）一定不在要显示的框内；或 c）说“我不知道它在哪里”。包括这些信息以确定回答者在回答时是否考虑了发问者先前的认知状态。实验1将6岁的成年人与成年人进行了比较，发现i）熟练使用硅就其他三个条件而言，这是昂贵的；并且 ii）与其他两个声明相比，出现“我不知道它在哪里”的提示会导致速度变慢。两项发现均与我们预先登记的预测一致。在实验2中调查的4岁儿童的模式与6岁儿童几乎相同，但有一个主要例外。他们最快的反应发生在回答Si时，从而导致独特的发展效果。我们对这一发现的解释是，四岁的孩子依靠Si的最小语义表示，它编码了问题的否定内容和事实之间的分歧。我们建议存在一些Si固有的实用过程，这些过程最终会发出信号同意发问者的隐含肯定–并且掌握这些内容需要更大的成熟度。