The analysis of implicit premises within children's argumentative inferences

Abstract

This paper presents prelim-inary findings of the project "Analyz-ing children's implicit argumentation: Reconstruction of procedural and material premises." This interdiscipli-nary project builds on argumentation theory and developmental sociocultur-al psychology for the study of chil-dren's argumentation. We reconstruct children's inferences in adult-child and child-child dialogical interaction in conversation in different settings. In particular, we focus on implicit premises using the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT) for the reconstruction of the inferential configuration of arguments. Our findings reveal that sources of misun-derstandings are, more often than not, due to misalignments of implicit premises between adults and children; these misalignments concern material premises rather than the inferential-procedural level.