To better understand the developmental trajectory of children's pragmatic development, studies that examine more than one type of implicature as well as associated linguistic and cognitive factors are required. We investigated three- to five-year-old English-speaking children's (N = 71) performance in ad hoc quantity, scalar quantity and relevance implicatures, as well as word learning by exclusion inferences, using a sentence-to-picture-matching story-based task. Children's pragmatic abilities improved with age, with word learning by exclusion acquired first, followed by relevance and ad hoc quantity implicatures, and finally scalar quantity implicatures. In an exploratory analysis (with a subset of the data N = 58), we found that structural language knowledge was a predictor of pragmatic performance (but no evidence for an association with socioeconomic status or Theory of Mind, controlling for structural language). We discuss reasons why this developmental pattern emerges with reference to linguistic and extra-linguistic properties of these inferences.

为了更好地理解儿童语用发展的发展轨迹，需要研究不止一种含义以及相关的语言和认知因素。我们使用句子到图片匹配的故事调查了 3 到 5 岁的说英语的儿童 (N = 71) 在临时数量、标量和相关含义以及通过排除推理的单词学习方面的表现- 基于任务。儿童的语用能力随着年龄的增长而提高，首先是通过排斥获得单词学习，其次是相关性和即席量含义，最后是标量含义。在探索性分析中（数据子集 N = 58），我们发现结构语言知识是语用表现的预测因子（但没有证据表明与社会经济地位或心理理论相关，控制结构语言）。我们参考这些推论的语言和语言外属性来讨论为什么会出现这种发展模式的原因。