Journal article: Children and Religion under Article 14 UNCRC: A Critical Analysis

This article examines the text of Article 14 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 and the work of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. It considers the text of the article and its travaux préparatoires; it then provides an analysis of the issues considered by the Committee: the concept of the evolving capacities of the child, freedom of religious choice, freedom of manifestation, and education. It also highlights the problems that have emerged in the Committee’s work, in the light of a theoretical framework of the right of the child to religious freedom in international law. It concludes that the Committee fails children in relation to their religion and suggests some positive steps to be taken by the Committee.

The story of some: Everyday pragmatic inference by children and adults

The statement, some elephants have trunks, is logically true but pragmatically infelicitous. Whilst some is logically consistent with all, it is often pragmatically interpreted as precluding all. In Experiments 1 and 2, we show that with pragmatically impoverished materials, sensitivity to the pragmatic implicature associated with some is apparent earlier in development than has previously been found. Amongst 8-year-old children, we observed much greater sensitivity to the implicature in pragmatically enriched contexts. Finally, in Experiment 3, we found that amongst adults, logical responses to infelicitous some statements take longer to produce than do logical responses to felicitous some statements, and that working memory capacity predicts the tendency to give logical responses to the former kind of statement. These results suggest that some adults develop the ability to inhibit a pragmatic response in favour of a logical answer. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of pragmatic inference.