Research into children’s understanding of language commonly employs truth-valuejudgments: whether a sentence can truthfully describe a given scenario. On the basis ofsuch judgments, researchers have concluded that young children perform quitedifferently from adults when it comes to understanding ambiguous utterances withmultiple potential meanings. However, subtle changes to the truth-value judgment tasksetup make children more adult-like. I summarize key results from the literature on childambiguity resolution, noting three factors that affect children’s disambiguation behavior.One of these factors concerns children’s processing ability: how easy it is to access thedifferent grammatical interpretations. The other two factors concern children’s ability tomanage the pragmatic context: understanding what the topic of conversation is, andmodulating expectations about the world being described. In an attempt to identify therole of each factor in language understanding, I then formally articulate a computationalcognitive model within the Bayesian Rational Speech Act framework that specifies therole of each of these three factors in providing truth-value judgments. The results suggestthat pragmatic factors may play a larger role than grammatical processing factors inexplaining children’s observed non-adult-like behavior, and the computational modeloffers a hypothesis as to why that’s so: pragmatic factors have a larger impact oninformativity, which serves as the ultimate arbiter of utterance endorsement in the truth-value judgment task. I close with a discussion of recent adult behavioral data furthersupporting the model’s predictions.