Scalar Implicatures and Implications

The week’s readings covered scalar implicatures and how we develop the ability to use them.  Both Barner and Stiller discuss how children are unable to identify scalar implicatures in language, and that they develop the ability to as they develop into adults.  In addition to showing what a scalar implicature is, it made me think about how often we use scalar implicatures in language to communicate things that we don’t explicitly say.

As an example, Barner uses that example of someone saying that they ate some of a cake.  An adult would take this to imply that that person did not eat the entire cake, but children have a much harder time drawing the same conclusion.  I thought it was interesting that even though children struggle with scalar implicatures, they are still able to think logically and pragmatically.  This makes me wonder whether children cannot understand scalar implicatures, or whether they simply don’t tend to think of them.  In other words, if you were to tell a child that “some” connotes something different than “all”, the child would immediately understand, but they just don’t immediately think that they should draw that connection in a context-neutral situation.

I also wonder whether adults’ tendencies to draw scalar implicatures could be detrimental in some situations.  There are obviously a host of riddles that rely upon scalar implicature to be tricky, but I wonder how often we misinterpret more important information due to this phenomenon.  If so, it could be necessary to a child’s development that they not have this ability until relatively mature stages of their development.