Although I learned a lot from Barner’s, Brook’s and Bale’s paper about what a great role scalar implicatures and scalar alternatives play in our daily lives as we are trying to describe what we see or do, and found really interesting Stiller’s, Goodman’s , and Frank’s point of how we use weak terms to imply the negation of stronger ones in the scale, I couldn’t help but think all throughout both papers, “Sherlock, adults are better on an area that I doubt many adults even understand.” Although I believe I have mastered my usage of some and all, I for one, learned about the complexity of scalar implicatures until my first quarter at Stanford when I was learning about the significance of “and” and “or” when programming. When introducing the topic, the professor read a sign on the classroom that read “No food or drink.” He then proceeded took a sip of a soda and ate some chips. The class roared with laughter; some of us confused of his point, some of us perplexed by what appeared to be a rebellious act, and some us truly both. He then went on to explain that the sign said that as a computer scientist one would refer that sign to mean that one couldn’t either perform one task, but could do both in conjunction and therefore not fail the logic. Hence, because the or meant that one couldn’t simply drink OR simply eat at the classroom, but there was no rule concerning both done at the same time. This is how I was introduced to Stiller’s point that scale arises from context rather than lexical terms, and I would say that on my own scale of children to adult in comparison to the paper’s experiments, I was more on the adult’s side, showing how even adults are still learning. Therefore, I think that it would have been more interesting to know about the development of the how the children jump from the logical reasoning to the pragmatic to the correct usage of scalar implicatures rather than focusing on making comparisons between 3-4 year olds and adults. For this reason, I was not surprised to learn Barner's conclusion that children must begin by learning the core meanings and syntactic properties of words for the purposes of pragmatic inference.
Thinking about the paper’s comparisons between children and adults, but lack of mention about the people from ages in the middle made me think about my own development about learning the differences of using some vs. all, and such. The first thing that came into my mind was about how as I grew up, my mother would ask me whether I have done my homework, and I would then respond, “I did homework”, trying to make the implication that I did,, but not committing to the point that I finished it. Unfortunately, as the paper would have predicted, my mother quickly caught up with it. I also remembered how tricky the SAT was when it came to multiple choices that included extremes such as “all” or “never” or included true/false statements in which a simple “or” or the lack of an element in “and” would make you pick the wrong answer, proving Stiller’s point that sometimes the absence of a description says just as much as its presence. Based on my experience, therefore, is that comes my sympathy and my lack of expectation for children to understand the difference between “some” and “all”.
What I found most interesting about this articles, however, was how an argument could be made about how neither paper included an experiment in which children were proved to make a false statement. I would make the argument that in Barner’s example that showed adult’s ability of scalar implicature for instance in which, children found ‘Some of the horses jumped over the log” a good description while adults denied that this was a good description, since all of the horses jumped over the log, children still grasped the truth, since ‘all’ would include ‘some’ as Stiller’s paper mentioned. Stiller’s paper provided an additional example to this point by his similar example in which children fail overwhelmingly at scalar pragmatic tasks where adults succeeded, after 87% of children accepted statements such as “Some elephants have trunks” whereas only 41% of adults did. Still, same point. Hence, I was happy that Stiller’s paper addressed the fact that ‘children never chose the logically incorrect answer (the Distractor)’, so they treated chance as 50% rather than 33%. Despite their scalar implicatures may not be the best, I still admire the great logic found in children of such an early age, and made me wonder whether such logic led to the phrase that all children and drunk people say the truth. Is it because they avoid specificity and focus on a general, logical idea?
Finally, both papers made me reflect about how context plays a very big role on how we use scalar implicature and how its usage is learned, and hence made me interested in learning more about the process of how we modify our logic and pragmatic usage to fit scalar implicature. As I described, I feel I am still learning the logic behind a lot of language such as double negatives, which I was surprised were not mentioned. I wonder whether there is a stage in life where we all become better in the technique or whether it is just a learning process based on our surroundings. It would be interesting to conduct an experiment where some 3-4 year olds were corrected once or twice about using the correct scalar implicature and then test them again days later in comparison with 3-4 years olds that haven’t been previously corrected and think about how much of that correction sticks to the different children in average. I additionally think that this experiment would pose further questions about a child’s learning.
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