Both Stiller and Barner examined the intriguing phenomenon of Scalar Implicature comprehension in children. While Stiller examined the effectiveness of reducing this phenomenon through the use of other words, Barner investigated the implications of the phenomenon on learning through the use of what he calls "Ad-Hoc" implicatures (Aka pictures that illustrate the questions being asked to the children).
These two papers, when taken together, imply that children's misunderstanding of simple "Scalar Implicature" questions is not due to their inability to solve these kinds of logical puzzles, if that was the case then even the addition of "Ad-Hoc" pictures and clarifying words such as "Only" and "All" would not help the children come to the correct answers. If anything, these studies, prove that the barrier is a linguistic one and that children somehow learn a better grasp of how to interpret how to "decode" the question into a solvable problem as they get older, not that they learn a better way to solve the problem itself.
This has interesting implications for the conceptualization of human problem-solving skills. Does this mean that young children might have a much better grasp of problem-solving skills than we last thought? Only further study can tell!
Because you brought up the point of children having more advanced problem-solving skills than we think, it reminded me of a story my teacher told me in 5th grade. She visited kindergarten and asked the kids a seemingly straightforward question: "What is the best way to cut grass?" Of course, most of them answered with "lawnmower" or "scissors". There was one kid who answered "turn a helicopter upside-down". It's always stuck with me because it's really amazing that even though they're so young, their problem-solving skills and creative thinking can be pretty advanced.
ReplyDelete