About all of us when we were younger have asked a teacher, “Can
I go to the bathroom?” and gotten the response, “I don’t know, CAN you?”.
Besides learning that your teacher is a huge jerk, this also holds an
important lesson about how our agreed upon meanings of words do not necessarily
line up with what our words literally mean. The readings this week talked about this idea.
The readings this week both dealt with the ability of
children to understand scalar implicatures. A scalar implicature is the ability
to infer information from a speaker that was not necessarily said but was
intended. For instance, if John says, “Did you eat my cake” and Mary says, “I
ate some of it”, one would generally understand that Mary did not eat all of
the cake, although logically she could have eaten all of the cake if she also
ate some of it. Children however sometimes have trouble making these inferences
and the two studies look at this phenomenon albeit in slightly different ways.
The Stiller article in short showed that scalar implicatures
are more accurate when given more context across children and adults.
Additionally, adults were better at making these inferences. This is due to the
fact that adults have more life experience and context to draw from in order to
make more accurate inferences. Therefore, one factor in children’s lack of
scalar implicature skill is due to their lack of context.
The Barner article on the other hand tested the relationship
between children’s lexical knowledge and their ability to compute scalar
implicatures. An example of this is in the example “some of the toys are on the
table” adults are able to compute a scalar implicature but children fail
because they lack knowledge of alternatives to the word “some.” The results of
the testing suggested that children’s inability to compute scalar implicatures
is due to their limited lexical knowledge.
After reading both of these articles, I think it is fair to
assume that both limited lexical knowledge and limited life experience leads to
children being less able to compute scalar implicatures. My second thought
after reading these articles is which effect is greater? Personally, I would
think that the limited life experience is a larger hindrance to children
learning language because language is in fact not completely logical. I feel like
the underlying issue here is that humans generally don’t leave out information
when it could be misleading. For instance, I would not say “I ate some of the
cake” if I really ate all of the cake. Another consideration that comes to mind
after reading these two articles is how children learn language. These two
articles show that language acquisition is not merely learning the meaning of
words and transitions. Learning language also involves learning nuances when
language does not act logically. Although sometimes language does not act
logically, it is generally easy to know what people mean through these logical
faults. It makes me wonder how the illogical parts of language evolved and how
this may vary even among different languages.
I agree with your idea that limited life experience has the larger effect on why children have difficulty with scalar implicature. Also, do you think children would be likely to say that they ate "some of the cake" if they were asked how much they ate, given that they had eaten all of the cake?
ReplyDeleteHey Skyler! I think your comment about humans generally preferring to use the scaler implicature that most accurately represents the "extent" of an action so that they don't leave out any information was particularly interesting. I guess I've never thought about the logical accuracy of eating "some" of the cake before, but it's interesting to think about how saying you ate "some" is not lying, but it is leaving out some information about the extent of an action. Language acquisition really is nuanced and sometimes illogical, and it makes me think of how difficult it is to learn a language later on in life.
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