Oh hey there, Grice

"Neither the word only nor the quantifier was emphasized by the experimenter’s prosody." - Barner, p.92

As a kid, I often exploited the implicatures of words like "some" to get away with deceiving without outright lying. I was scrupulous and somewhat obsessive about not lying, but I apparently I had no problem with cutting some corners. However, I realized that I could only make it believable if I delivered the line with the right prosody. That is, I had to fight the urge to highlight my conniving, to show off to the people I wished to remain inconspicuous to. (By people, I mainly mean my mom and dad.)

It was really interesting to me that the Barner study, the Stiller study and the studies they cite find a lot of linguistic and semantic sophistication in young children. I see this linguistic capacity in my little siblings and cousins, and I have vivid memories about my own early reasoning. I took home that kids have to learn some scalars; it's truly amazing to see a bit of our linguistic capacity come to be. Still, the fact that "inferential mechanisms underlying implicature are present in young children" (Stiller) is awe-inspiring to me. Why and how this is the case remains to me an open question that I'd like to explore more deeply.