Implicatures - Confusing for adults as well as children

After reading these articles, I noticed myself being more aware of implicatures such as ‘none’, ‘some’, and ‘all’ in conversations with friends. I actually was pointing someone out in a crowd to a friend, and found myself saying “the one with glasses” to differentiate two people. Similarly to the example in the Stiller article, both people had glasses, and one of them, who I will call person 2, had a backwards baseball cap on, but I pointed out the one without the cap (person 1) by describing him as “the one with glasses.” I had never thought about how we as adults use this unconscious strategy to differentiate objects - we are always as descriptive as possible when talking about a certain object. In my example, if I had wanted to talk about person 2, I would have said “the one with the baseball cap” because that was a distinction between the two people. Because my friend expects this to be the description used for person 2, my initial comment “the one with the glasses” could only possibly refer to person 1. 

I found Stiller’s findings that only 41% of adults accepted the statement “some elephants have trunks” as true interesting, because to me, I think that I would say that this statement is true. However, sitting here after reading the article, it’s hard to say if I am biased towards saying true because of what I have read - for all I know I would probably answer ‘false’ like the majority of adults did to this question. To me, a different example would make this phenomenon more expected: say there are a bunch of red-colored objects on a table. The statement “some of the objects are red” would seem false to me, because they are clearly all red. In this situation, I find it easier to see the some/not-all implicature. 

The way that Barner presents how adults derive a scalar implicature makes it easy to see why children generally have problems with them. Barner’s four steps for deriving a scalar implicature are reminiscent of a complex computer program involving sets, iterating through those sets, and eliminating elements from them. No wonder children can’t understand these things the way adults do! Obviously this becomes subconscious through practice and exposure to situations in real life - children who have not yet mastered this pragmatism just need more time.