Both of the articles this week dealt with scalar implicature in adults versus children. The first article I read, by Barner, Brooks, and Bale, dealt with the issues children dealt with when facing scalar implicatures and why this is so. After doing research in which they showed 60 children 12 pictures followed by 8 cards depicting a scene and later asking the children whether certain sentences were true or false, they found that often times it is children's inability to find scalar alternatives (or processing limitations) that led to their issues in scalar implicature.
The second article I read, by Stiller, Goodman, and Frank, had 3 experiments. Taken together these three experiments showed that many adults and children can use their real world knowledge to make judgments about conditions that are probably more rare or less rare (such as having a top hat etc.). The difference between adults and children however is that adults have actual real world knowledge, whereas children do not, they must be taught "real world knowledge" like in experiment 3 in order to perform as well as adults. While children still had issues finding alternatives in scalar implicature, they did perform better on implicature tasks if they were trained that certain objects were more commonplace then others.
The connection between the two articles I got was that the first one was a good presentation of the general problem, and a sort of general understanding of why children struggle with implicature. Whereas the second article looked to find a concrete answer to 'how' and 'why' children struggle with implicature, and at what level does the issue of implicature arise.
When thinking about the topic of implicature the first 'realm' that comes to mind is the internet. The internet is full of memes and the like, and often times these memes and other jokes are full of implicature. Sometimes there can even be several layers of implicature which often times make the jokes even funnier. This is a sort of new space where language has really been manipulated and restructured over the past couple of years and I think more research on the complexity of the implicature online would be incredibly interesting.
While I'm not super into memes, don't get me wrong, they're great, I agree with your point that they're an interesting which require our skills of implicature to enjoy.
ReplyDeleteBut I also think so much of our life, like memes, requires being able to pick up implied meanings. Right now in my relational sociology class we're reading a work that argues a majority of conversation/interaction between couples in a relationship is left perfectly vague, only interpretable through subjectively perceived understandings of past experiences. So our ability to make inferences in meaning goes well beyond scales and it would be interesting to see just how complex these skills get and when and how we develop them.
Yeah, part of humor is the relative alternatives to what you could have said. Especially darker humor or anti-jokes that come to mind. Some might even say that inside jokes are built that way. Either way, the context for your humor is something that has to be learned/taught, much like scalar implicature.
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