Acquistion of languages and scalar alternatives

Barner, Brooks and Bale discuss scalar alternatives and the apparent inability of children to use them. Children consistently exhibited difficulties in computing strengthened interpretations for context-independent scales (such as the use of some/all). For contextualised scales, when specific alternatives were given, children performed far more successfully on the test. A finding of this study that I thought to be particularly interesting was that children’s limitations were not associated with memory or processing constraints. Rather they struggled with the concept of the word ‘some’, especially when it was not prefaced with the word ‘only’. This paper prompted the question in my mind of the consistency of this finding across other languages. Having grown up in a multilingual household I would be curious to see if findings are similar in different languages, and perhaps more interestingly if the findings remain consistent amongst English speaking children who are multilingual, and so might have a different understanding of scalar alternatives.

Clark and Hecht’s paper looks at word formation in regards to language acquisition. Essentially, the paper finds that linguistic development with regards to, in this case, comparatives, develops from a simplistic initial use to a competent point as age and proficiency in the language increases. Furthermore, the paper finds that children have the ability to improve their vocabularies through applying their intuitive understanding of the rules of the language.

Stiller, Goodman and Frank’s paper examines understanding of inference amongst children, and the scalar implicature development through ages. The study finds that people (both children and adults) use statistical likelihoods to influence their scalar pragmatics. Rarity vs commonness affects the information interpreted and what can be inferred. Similar findings can be seen with the previous two papers, as competency in the English language begins at a rather simplistic and often erroneous understanding of the concept, and develops to a place of fluency. Through all of these studies I would be interested in seeing the consistencies of the findings across other languages.