In the Barner reading, the study showed that it was easier for children to create associations that have to do with the context, such as the animals “cat” and “dog” than to create associations with words that are context-independent, such as “some”. Perhaps context-independent alternatives are too ambiguous and vague for children to understand, where as contextual alternatives are more specific. It also perhaps has to do with the visual aspect of learning too; I hypothesize that children are more visual, therefore if you show them a picture they’re more likely to recall words such as “cat”, where they can picture an actual cat. But if you ask them about “some” they can’t visualize “some” concretely in their brains. Regarding the “all” vs. “some” problem, to me, if I were to represent “all” and “some” in mathematical percentages, I would say “all” = 100%, and %0 < “some” < %100. But perhaps this is something that is natural to me only having grown up as a English speaker, and that “some” actually means “some amount” without any specification of how much, so “some” could technically mean “some amount which equals 100%”. With regards to the statement that “words exhibit mutual exclusivity, or contrast”, I think, also relatedly, that children are extremely good a process of elimination, which is something that has been shown as an effective test-taking technique for children on standardized tests (which is why teachers encourage students to learn process of elimination techniques), which follows from the assumption that words exhibit mutual exclusivity. The study found that “children were able to assign strengthened interpretations to utterances when they included the focus element “only”, as long as alternatives were provided contextually”. I personally think this is plausible because the word “only” tends to be used in situations where the expectation of the amount is higher than the actual amount, therefore implying that the actual amount is not 100% or “all”.
As future or follow up work to Barner study, I would be interested in testing the ability of children to compute scalar implicatures of superlatives sets, such as {“good”, “better”, “best”}. I hypothesize that a set such as the example given would actually induce increased ability in computing scalar implicatures because these are words fundamental to child development and growth as well as performance in preschool or lower grades. Teachers and parents are conditioned to use these terms constantly to describe their children’s progress, as well as to compare with other children, say, in the same class. Having grown up in the bay area, I can predict that such a language pattern is especially prevalent among bay area children and parents, and children who constantly hear these terms being used to judge themselves will also be induced to constantly compare themselves with others.
The Stiller Reading similarly was interested in children’s abilities to compute scalar implicature, however Stiller performed experiments on both adults and children whereas the Barner reading focused experiments on children. Contrary to the Barner reading, Stiller touched upon the linguistic alternatives theory on the top of negating features. I also agree that absence of a feature is more difficult to process than an alternative feature, and I can relate this to the idea of double negatives, where in grammar we are discouraged to use double negatives where we are placing “not” in front of a word or phrase simply because it is less intuitive to process. In the application of computer science programming practices, the use of negatives is also discouraged because it reduces code readability, implying that this concept of negatives is a more general rule of thumb than the scope of linguistics, and is more of a rule that should be applied to anything to do with logical processing. Also, to compare the Barner and Stiller readings, Barner believes that children’s difficulties in computing scalar implicatures are scale-specific and not due to pragmatic immaturity, while Stiller believes that the difficulties are issues with the lexical items that are used in these tasks.
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