Learning to Presuppose

An utterance can convey information explicitly or implicitly, but it can also presuppose it – that is, treat it as already taken for granted by the interlocutors. Presupposition is therefore a powerful linguistic tool; one that can also be effectively recruited for persuasive speech. Recent experimental investigations have shed more light on how adults interpret presupposition and how children acquire other pragmatic phenomena, such as implicature and metaphor. It is now time to shift our attention to how children learn to distinguish between presupposed and non-presupposed information. Despite growing interest, our understanding of presupposition development remains patchy. Previous acquisition research has been conducted in a fragmented manner, examining specific presupposition triggers individually. Here we gather these findings to gain insights into the development of presupposition as a unified phenomenon. In contrast with earlier data, recent results consistently indicate that preschoolers have considerable presuppositional abilities in line with other pragmatic skills. Children, nonetheless, still exhibit noticeable difficulties when confronted with higher cognitive demands or the need for a more complex presupposition representation. Based on this review, we put forward a list of factors that influence presupposition development and pinpoint areas that demand further exploration.