David Barner

Datos Biográficos

ID131865
NOMBREDavid Barner
NOMBRESDavid
APELLIDOBarner
FIRMABARNER D
AFILIACIONESUniversity of California San Diego
ORCID0009-0004-3439-3145
VERIFICADOSí
TOTAL DE OBRAS38
TOTAL DE CITAS61
TOTAL COMO AUTOR38
TOTAL COMO EDITOR0
PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN2002
AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN2026
ÍNDICE H4

  • Conditional inference and access to alternatives

    Open AccessEbru Evcen, Alan Bale et al.ARTICLEJournal of Semantics2026

    Conditional statements often imply meanings that extend beyond their literal content, influenced by contextual factors such as the Question Under Discussion (QUD) and a speaker’s epistemic state. One such inference is Conditional Perfection (CP), wherein a statement like, “If p then q,” is strengthened to imply that the antecedent p is the only contextually salient condition under which the consequent q holds (e.g. “p if and only if q”). While pr…

  • Training “Zero” in preschoolers

    Open AccessYanfei Yu, Marianna Thorne et al.ARTICLECognition2026

  • Object-mass nouns specify individuation lexically

    Open AccessKhuyen N Le, Alan Bale et al.ARTICLEGlossa a journal of general…2026

    In many languages, words in count syntax quantify over countable individuals (e.g., too many strings), while mass nouns often don’t (e.g., too much string). Theories differ in how they characterize nouns that violate this pattern, such as object-mass nouns (e.g. furniture, clothing). These nouns exhibit mass syntax, but often quantify by number (Barner & Snedeker, 2005). On one hypothesis, the individuation of object-mass nouns is lexically speci…

  • Competence by default

    Open AccessAlan Bale, HISAKO NOGUCHI et al.ARTICLEJournal of Semantics2025

    When engaged in conversation, do listeners make default assumptions about the epistemic states of speakers? According to some accounts, when listeners hear a sentence like “Sarah solved some of the math problems,” they infer by default that speakers believe that the stronger statement involving “all” is false (i.e. that Sarah did not solve all of the problems). However, drawing on tests of reading time, eye tracking, and manipulations of cognitiv…

  • Already Perfect

    Open AccessEbru Evcen, David BarnerARTICLEOpen MIND2025

    Conditional statements often have two interpretations. For instance, the statement, “If you mow the lawn, you will receive $5”, might be understood to mean that mowing the lawn is just one possible way to earn $5 or, more strongly, that mowing the lawn is the only way one can receive $5 – an interpretation sometimes called Conditional Perfection. We investigated how people arrive at “perfected” interpretations of conditional statements: whether t…

  • How Do Children Construct a Concept of Age

    Kosta Boskovic, David BarnerARTICLEDevelopmental Psychology2025

    Acquiring an adultlike understanding of age involves coordinating knowledge across several domains of abstract content (e.g., time, number, biology). In the present study, we explored children's early understanding of age and how it is informed by features including size, facial and bodily morphology, and numerical age. Across two preregistered experiments, we tested 215 three- to five-year-old children on their identification of which of two fig…

  • The effect of online methods on epistemic inference and scalar implicature

    Open AccessAlan Bale, Maho Takahashi et al.ARTICLEJournal of Pragmatics2025Referencias: 7

  • The development of cardinal extension

    Open AccessKhuyen N Le, Rose M Schneider et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Psychology2025

    Numerate adults know that when two sets are equal, they should be labeled by the same number word. We explored the development of this principle-sometimes called "cardinal extension"-and how it relates to children's other numerical abilities. Experiment 1 revealed that 2- to 5-year-old children who could accurately count large sets often inferred that two equal sets should be labeled with the same number word, unlike children who could not accura…

  • Learning a Novel Number System

    Open AccessSebastian Holt, David BarnerARTICLECognitive Science2025Referencias: 68

    Humans count to indefinitely large numbers by recycling words from a finite list, and combining them using rules—for example, combining sixty with unit labels to generate sixty‐one, sixty‐two, and so on. Past experimental research has focused on children learning base‐10 systems, and has reported that this rule learning process is highly protracted. This raises the possibility that rules are slow to emerge because they are not needed in order to …

  • Introducing Mr. Three

    Open AccessKatharine A Tillman, Kaelie N Wagner et al.ARTICLEOpen MIND2024

    Children learn their first number words gradually over the course of many months, which is surprising given their ability to discriminate small numerosities. One potential explanation for this is that children are sensitive to the numerical features of stimuli, but don’t consider exact cardinality as a primary hypothesis for novel word meanings. To test this, we trained 144 children on a number word they hadn’t yet learned, and contrasted this wi…

  • Creating ad hoc graphical representations of number

    Open AccessSebastian Holt, Judith E Fan et al.ARTICLECognition2024

    The ability to communicate about exact number is critical to many modern human practices spanning science, industry, and politics. Although some early numeral systems used 1-to-1 correspondence (e.g., 'IIII' to represent 4), most systems provide compact representations via more arbitrary conventions (e.g., '7' and 'VII'). When people are unable to rely on conventional numerals, however, what strategies do they initially use to communicate number?…

  • Everything is Infinite

    Open AccessJessica Sullivan, Sophie Cramer-Benjamin et al.ARTICLEOpen MIND2023

    How do children form beliefs about the infinity of space, time, and number? We asked whether children held similar beliefs about infinity across domains, and whether beliefs in infinity for domains like space and time might be scaffolded upon numerical knowledge (e.g., knowledge successors within the count list). To test these questions, 112 U.S. children (aged 4;0–7;11) completed an interview regarding their beliefs about infinite space, time, a…

  • Quantifier spreading and the question under discussion

    Open AccessDimitrios Skordos, Allyson Myers et al.ARTICLECognition2022

  • Counting and the ontogenetic origins of exact equality

    Open AccessRose M Schneider, Erik Brockbank et al.ARTICLECognition2022

  • Assessing the knower-level framework

    Open AccessElisabeth Marchand, Jarrett Lovelett et al.ARTICLECognition2022

    The Give-a-Number task has become a gold standard of children's number word comprehension in developmental psychology. Recently, researchers have begun to use the task as a predictor of other developmental milestones. This raises the question of how reliable the task is, since test-retest reliability of any measure places an upper bound on the size of reliable correlations that can be found between it and other measures. In Experiment 1, we prese…

  • Children gradually construct spatial representations of temporal events

    Open AccessKatharine A Tillman, Eren Fukuda et al.ARTICLEChild Development2022

    English-speaking adults often recruit a “mental timeline” to represent events from left-to-right (LR), but its developmental origins are debated. Here, we test whether preschoolers prefer ordered linear representations of events and whether they prefer culturally conventional directions. English-speaking adults (n = 85) and 3- to 5-year-olds (n = 513; 50% female; ~47% white, ~35% Latinx, ~18% other; tested 2016–2018) were told three-step stories …

  • Do children derive exact meanings pragmatically? Evidence from a dual morphology language

    Open AccessFranc Marušič, Rok Žaucer et al.ARTICLECognition2021

    Number words allow us to describe exact quantities like sixty-three and (exactly) one. How do we derive exact interpretations? By some views, these words are lexically exact, and are therefore unlike other grammatical forms in language. Other theories, however, argue that numbers are not special and that their exact interpretation arises from pragmatic enrichment, rather than lexically. For example, the word one may gain its exact interpretation …

  • What Counts? Sources of Knowledge in Children’s Acquisition of the Successor Function

    Open AccessRose M Schneider, Jessica Sullivan et al.ARTICLEChild Development2021

    Although many U.S. children can count sets by 4 years, it is not until 51⁄2–6 years that they understand how counting relates to number—that is, that adding 1 to a set necessitates counting up one number. This study examined two knowledge sources that 31⁄2- to 6-year-olds (N = 136) may leverage to acquire this “successor function”: (a) mastery of productive rules governing count list generation; and (b) training with “+1” math facts. Both product…

  • Disjunction Triggers Exhaustivity Implicatures in 4- to 5-Year-Olds

    Open AccessNicole Gotzner, David Barner et al.ARTICLEJournal of Semantics2020

    Children’s difficulty deriving scalar implicatures has been attributed to a variety of factors including processing limitations, an inability to access scalar alternatives, and pragmatic tolerance. The present research explores the nature of children’s difficulty by investigating a previously unexplored kind of inference—an exhaustivity implicature that is triggered by disjunction. We reasoned that if children are able to draw quantity implicatur…

  • Do Children Interpret ‘or’ Conjunctively?

    Open AccessDimitrios Skordos, Roman Feiman et al.ARTICLEJournal of Semantics2020

    Preschoolers often struggle to compute scalar implicatures involving disjunction (or), in which they are required to strengthen an utterance by negating stronger alternatives, e.g. to infer that, ‘The girl has an apple or an orange’ likely means she does not have both. However, recent reports surprisingly find that a substantial subset of children interpret disjunction as conjunction, concluding instead that the girl must have both fruits. Accord…

  • Do children use language structure to discover the recursive rules of counting

    Open AccessRose M Schneider, Jessica Sullivan et al.ARTICLECognitive Psychology2020

  • Children’s Intergroup Attitudes

    Open AccessHaleh Yazdi, David Barner et al.ARTICLEChild Development2020

    Children generally favor individuals in their own group over others, but it is unclear which dimensions of the out-group affect this bias. This issue was investigated among 7- to 8-year-old and 11- to 12-year-old Iranian children (N = 71). Participants evaluated in-group members and three different out-groups: Iranian children from another school, Arab children, and children from the United States. Children’s evaluations closely aligned with the …

  • Language Comprehension, Inference, and Alternatives

    Dimitrios Skordos, David BarnerCHAPTEROxford Handbook of Experimental…2019

    This chapter discusses the importance of pragmatic inference involving alternatives for language comprehension, reviewing the problem of restricting the inferential hypothesis space. It presents a brief overview of theoretical and empirical work on adults and then turns to developmental evidence from two characteristic case studies: scalar implicature and quantifier spreading, where children struggle when interpreting sentences including quantifi…

  • Differentiating scalar implicature from exclusion inferences in language acquisition

    Open AccessJessica Sullivan, Kathryn Davidson et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2019

    During acquisition, children must learn both the meanings of words and how to interpret them in context. For example, children must learn the logical semantics of the scalar quantifier some and its pragmatically enriched meaning: ‘some but not all’. Some studies have shown that ‘scalar implicature’ – that some implies ‘some but not all’ – poses a challenge even to nine-year-olds, while others find success by age three. We asked whether reports of…

  • Language, procedures, and the non-perceptual origin of number word meanings

    Open AccessDavid BarnerARTICLEJournal of Child Language2017

    Perceptual representations of objects and approximate magnitudes are often invoked as building blocks that children combine to acquire the positive integers. Systems of numerical perception are either assumed to contain the logical foundations of arithmetic innately, or to supply the basis for their induction. I propose an alternative to this framework, and argue that the integers are not learned from perceptual systems, but arise to explain perc…