On Cheetahs, Chain Emails, and Cake

This week’s readings examined linguistic failures on children’s parts when it comes to scalar implicature, which, in Stiller’s words, is “the conversational shorthand of using weak terms to imply the negation of stronger ones that lie along the same “scale” (Stiller 1). According to Stiller, “children fail overwhelmingly at scalar pragmatic tasks where adults succeed” (Stiller 2), and that “children with syntactic mastery of quantifiers such as “some” and “none” still failed to make the some/not-all implicature” (Stiller 2). Stiller cites the statistic that “87% of children accepted statements such as “Some elephants have trunks” whereas only 41% of adults did” (Stiller 2) as being proof of children’s inability to apply scalar implicature, but I don’t necessarily read that stat as being a black mark against childhood psycholinguistics.

More than anything, these readings reminded me of chain emails that used to be passed around in middle school (about 2006-ish) that asked seemingly simple questions and instead tripped up adults on what should be common-sense observations. These emails would ask about a cheetah opening a refrigerator and eating the food, and then ask another question about an elephant opening a refrigerator and eating food – however, the elephant cannot eat any food because it’s already been eaten by the cheetah. As adults, we are taught to generalize and view the world by the rules through which we have been told it is governed. Stiller says that the criteria for their experiments were “ad-hoc scales—scales constructed from contextual, rather than conventional linguistic factors” (Stiller 5). That is likely the reason adults performed better on disambiguating linguistic expressions; the age discrepancy is more due to the social conditioning and contextual experience that adults have already gained than something inherently missing in childhood developmental psychology. As adults, we assume that the baseline that we have established for the world – such as, “all elephants have trunks” or “the sky is blue” as absolute truths that do not vary, when, in fact, they vary quite a bit, between the poaching industry and sunrises, sunsets, or storms, respectively.

 Children who hear that Mary “had in fact eaten the whole cake (eating all entails eating some), [so] her utterance… implies that she did not” (Barner 1) probably wouldn’t care that Mary had only eaten a portion of John’s cake – Mary did still, in fact, consume something that wasn’t hers, and the differentiation in scalar implicature would therefore be irrelevant. Children’s inability to process scalar implicature is not necessarily a failing, as scalar implicature seems to me to be just a feature of communication and psychological delineation that we have decided to employ in order to make general intuitive leaps easier, even if that generalization later proves to not cover all possible scenarios.

Side note: I also found the Grice maxim that Stiller quotes – “make your contribution as informative as is required, and do not make your contribution more informative than is required” (Stiller 1) really entertaining, as that sentence essentially sums up every piece of writing advice I’ve ever heard, both in and out of formal education.