"Five."
"Nope, four! The thumb's not a finger!"
We've all been there. Probably both as the kid annoyingly giving the joke and the kid frustratingly receiving it. Whenever someone pulled the joke on you as a kid, you felt duped. How could you have been so naive? Of course the thumb is not a finger. You knew that. As an adult, your at a loss. How can I possibly explain to this kid that even though he was technically right, no sane adult would ever count the thumb as not a finger? How could you prevent millions more people from having to hear this awful joke? And why was the kid so smug? Does he know that he's being intentionally obtuse, or does he genuinely think he outsmarted you?
Believe it or not, these reading provide some insight into that last question. When it comes to scalar implicature, Children had far more success when things were spelled out for them. For example, in the sleeping animals experiment, they correctly used "the cat and dog are sleeping/only the cat and dog are sleeping," where the animals and the number of animals sleeping are explicitly spelled out for them. In other words, the context is given to them. But they had significantly more trouble using context/independent words, such as "some" or "all." Children have no problem with adhering to given contexts, but cannot divine large scale cultural contexts such as how using the word "some" implies that "all" animals aren't sleeping.
The context the child is being given in the thumb/finger joke is that the thumb is not a finger. They learn it, they understand it, they run with it. But as in the "some" vs "all" example, they cannot understand the larger cultural context if it is not explicitly given to them. This is one reason why communicating with children can be so damn infuriating. If you are in a position of authority such that they will actually listen to you, they hang on to your every word and treat it like gospel. This sounds great in theory, until you realize you a flawed human being. If you ever make a mistake, or you told a white lie to ameliorate a short term situation, the child will resist any new information that contradicts what you told them previously. If you give your child a piece of chocolate at night after previously telling them that eating chocolate after a certain time will rot their teeth, you're in for a long round of "I thought you said.." as your child struggles to understand the changing context.
This only part of why talking to children is frustrating. If they were just incapable of rational thought and needed to be spoonfed everything, you could plan for it. But what makes it truly frustrating is that some times they show themselves to be far more capablet than you had thought, but other times behave as if their previous logical capabilities never happened, and would never happen again. Funnily enough, this kind of relates to Stiller's paper, where his experiments found that children theoretically had the mechanisms for understanding implicature, but for some reason still didn't understand implicature. It's like in this Spongebob clip; Manta Ray walks Patrick through the logic behind why the wallet is his, only to have Patrick disagree with the conclusion. All of the mechanisms are in place, and yet he still cannot perform the operation he should be able to perform. This isn't just limited to scalar implicature. In fact, the most vivid memory of this sort of thing happening is related to empathy. I walked by godbrother through why he would feel bad if something happened to him, but he still could not understand why his brother would feel bad if it happened to his brother. I felt just as frustrated as Manta did with Patrick.
In summary, communicating with children is so damn infuriating because, as shown in these papers, they can understand things that are explicitly told to them but cannot extrapolate further, and they show methods of logical thinking but still fail to come up with the correct conclusions.
I agree that talking with children can be extremely infuriating, especially when they can kick you straight in the shins but you would look like Satan incarnate if you reciprocated. It is interesting how children think and talk, though, because they're like fresh humans, still unrestricted by any societal constraints. The first example I can think of for this point: I once volunteered at a preschool and befriended a little girl named Emma. We were gathering leaves so that she could "make dinner" for us in the play kitchen. She turned to me, eyes large, face solemn. She placed a leaf in my hand and said in a low voice: "I farted."
ReplyDeleteI thoroughly enjoyed your blog post. I found it very funny and really appreciated the Spongebob reference. I like that you incorporated culture into these readings. I wonder if acquisition of scalar implicature is different in the brains of children across cultures. Also, do you think that maybe the answer to the final question in the first paragraph can be in between outsmart and obtuse? What if he is not quite sure about his belief in it and he is simply enthralled with the new information he has learned about thumbs? Is this a spectrum or a line one crosses?
ReplyDeleteWhere in the Stiller article did it say children had all the mechanisms, but couldn't understand implicature? Maybe I didn't comprehend that part. I liked the Spongebob example, but in my (admittedly limited) experience with small children, I've found that their ways of thinking are fascinating, and not necessarily that obtuse. If anything, they make you re-assess your implications and assumptions because of their refreshingly brash lines of questioning. As you said, when you have a flaw in your reasoning, children will find it and question it. While that might be infuriating, it also gives you a chance to clarify and untangle the complicated implications we sometimes take for granted.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how your point fits into the trend of children over generalizing rules. When they learn something, as you point out, they tend to hold onto that fact and refuse to see how exceptions apply. For example, when I was 2-3, I apparently use to think that "Miami" was "someone's ami", or that since people often called me "Ana", that Ari was a prifix (since everyone around me had two syllable names), so would call people "Ari-mommy", "Ari-daddy", etc. I know this is a common error that children make during language acquisition, as well as not understanding how a word like "for" can also be used as "four", and therefore omit the number from their count. Thus it seems that what you are describing is part of a larger linguistic, developmental trend, in addition to small children just being inherently very frustrating.
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