Through high school, I baby sat my Uncle and Aunt's daughter, from the time she was 2 years old, to when she turned 6. It was an amazing experience to see her grow up, an extremely intriguing aspect of her upbringing is her cultural background- her Mum is Russian, and her Dad is Indian, but she grew up in an expat neighborhood with an English nanny. Growing up, she acquired bits of three languages- Hindi, Russian and English- she'd often confuse the languages and speak a mix of all three, depending on who she'd spent the most time with in the last couple of days!
Something I noticed about her understanding of language was how she used implicatures to make requests and how tough she found it to understand implicatures, especially implicit implicatures. It soon became a running joke in the family- whether she was given 2 sweets or 5 she'd always ask for "some more", and was always satisfied whether she finally ended up with 5 or 8. She didn't understand the idea of the scalar implication of her request, and was satisfied if a couple were added to her initial request for "some". This incident immediately came back to me with Stiller's reading as he introduced, "Young children perform poorly on tests of implicatures, especially scalar implicatures using "some" and "all". Moreover, what I found it especially interesting to read about Stiller's investigation of contextual factors (ad-hoc scales), and the way this relates to inferential mechanisms in young children. Since the stimuli used were visual rather than quantitative, I think an interesting analysis would be to try to measure children's inference capacities when visual aid (through top hats or glasses) is not provided, but only mathematical/quantitative stimuli are set.
Moreover, my cousin's satisfaction with her sweets regardless of the number she finally had was indicative of Barner's extremely compelling observation, that children"lack knowledge of relevant scalar alternatives to words like some". Since she did not attach a number to her request of some sweets, getting a few more post what her mother gave her was enough for her, and she hadn't had a specific quantitative expectation of the word "some" in the first place! This was interesting to think in light of the balloon example in Barner's experiment (one balloon and a set of five balloons). This led me to think about a really interesting further study- to analyze the expectation and implications of words such as "some"and numerical factors such as "one and a set of five" across languages. For example, would my cousin's (or any other multi-lingual child's) understanding of implicatures be different across languages, based on how that word is structures in that particular language? What expectations would narrow down her inferences based on what the word or the phrase means in that particular language?
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