Returning to the context of Language acquisition

After spending a couple weeks delving into sociolinguistics and learning about different ways language can impact society and influence our way of thinking about people and situations, we now get to explore pragmatics, specifically, scalar implicature. I feel like this week's readings are definitely related in some ways to sociolinguistics, though, as they are looking at the way children and adults process specific language, much like the "triangle" vs. "three-sided polygon" article we read previously. However, the readings this week brought me back to thinking about linguistics in a multilingual context.

As a current learner of a second language, my natural inclination throughout this entire class has been to think about how these concepts apply to my study of a different language. This week's readings were particularly interesting with their experiments aimed towards children and how they might process scale a bit differently from adults. In weeks past I've found it kind of funny how I'm basically relearning things like syntax and semantic understanding while studying a new language, but this week's topic was unique in that I seemed to have retained the ability across languages to gauge scale. In fact, I found some of the scale words used in the experiments, like "only", "some", "most", or "all", to be some of the first ones I needed to translate in order to feel like I was communicating my point correctly. I feel like this really backs up the idea that grammar, or some sort of capability to understand language, is somewhat innate like has been discussed in previous readings, or at least that there is some common basis that human languages all share. Children seem to not quite grasp it simply because they have not had enough experience communicating, rather than being incapable of doing so. This is made clear when the children largely choose the correct response when given contextual cues. So, even when taking these scaling concepts to different languages, once learned, they seem to be mostly maintained so that, as long as you have the vocabulary, you are able to understand the intended scalar implication.