Context is Key

This week, we are introduced to pragmatics to explore context and scalar implicatures. Both articles conclude that children are less likely to distinguish between the quantifiers “some”, “all”, and “none” when compared to adults.

 Barner’s article described the 4 steps of deriving a scalar implicature. First, listeners compute a sentence’s literal meaning. Next, they create other alternatives to the sentence that could’ve been said. Third is narrowing down the list by removing less informative options. Lastly, listeners strengthen the meaning of the correct sentence with the negation of the other options. Barner’s experiment found that contextual alternatives were easily understood by children, but there was a lot of difficulty when it required them to generate their own alternatives by using “some”. They attribute this result to the idea of scales and "scale mates", and this requires children learning meanings and syntactic properties of words.

 While reading the article, I thought about how varied the term “some” is, along with words like “couple” and “few”. For me, “few” translates to “four”, but I’ve come in contact with many others who attribute the word to “three”. It’s interesting to think about how people have different meanings for the same word. This could be difficult for children and non-native speakers; when they use “some”, people can understand it differently depending on how they look at the word and its context.

 Moving to the Stiller article, it further explores the idea of scales, but with ad-hoc implicatures instead of scalar implicatures. Two explanations for implicatures include counterfactual, or Gricean, theory and linguistic alternatives theory. Children approach scalar implicatures logically while adults are able to think pragmatically. In Experiment 1, adults, unsurprisingly, were more accurate than the 3-4 year-olds, but the children performed better with the ad-hoc implicatures than they did with scalar implicatures. This result points to the idea that maybe comprehension is more lexical-based than pragmatic-based. The test subjects from Experiment 2, which explored counterfactual theory, did not realize that there was pragmatic content in the experiment without the scales, and they all performed at chance. Experiment 3, exploring linguistic alternatives theory, found that there was a direct relationship between the rarity of a feature and its ability to convey information.

 A real life example of the results of Experiment 3 that we all could relate to is the dreaded college application process. When writing your applications, every advisor and mentor tells you to be different and stand out. Admissions officers are more likely to remember you if you are different, if you are a rarity. The results of Stiller’s experiment confirm this idea.