This week’s readings focused largely on children’s abilities of comprehension with regards to implicature and pragmatic inference. Basically, their ability to understand statements beyond technicality of meaning and into implied differences and specifications. This is mainly discussed in reference to quantity, i.e. detecting the difference between “Some of the kids ate cake” and “The kids ate cake,” which both articles, particularly the Barner one, would argue could be understood as synonymous by a young child, but are clearly semantically different to adults.
This article made me think a lot about language learning, which has always been a strong interest of mine, not just that of children learning languages but in adults and children learning second+ languages. I remember learning in psychology about how, after a certain age, it becomes a lot harder for you to learn a second language to the point of being able to speak like a native speaker. This always seemed to me a sad thing as I didn’t start my own personally study of other languages until high school, but after reading these articles I am potentially thinking of it as more of a trade-off.
These articles highlight the complexity and nuance of language, much like our previous class discussion on translation and machine language (i.e. Siri translating), and how syntax alone is incredibly subtle, thus the translation of a sentence given by google or Siri, while technically correspondent to the given sentence, would be found to be awkward or less effective by a native speaker who would explain the subtle changes in grammar that would be how you “would actually say it.” Likewise, I always thought it was interesting to listen to those who are noticeably speaking english as a non-first language, because most of what they say is “correct” in the sense that they are using the words they know to technically convey information, but have always wondered what elements it is that make it clear that they are a non-native speaker, and this article also shed some light on that for me.
Much like children, i’m sure it is very hard for older second-language learners to understand these implications. Furthermore, because we have come to understand these implicatures and pragmatic inferences respective to our native languages, not only do we need to try to learn new ones, but to not confuse them with the ones we already have branded into our minds. Perhaps this partially explains the difficulty in truly achieving natural-sounding fluency, as these things must be harder to develop as an adult, who already has an understanding of them and whose brain functions of language acquisition have slowed greatly. I was curious about this after reading the articles and actually wanted to look at looked at not only my own experience in second language study, but a few examples of people speaking second language english (i.e. in film clips) and try to look at what it was that was not “normal,” even if it was technically effective, and see if these kinds of things seem to be common; differences between things like “only some” and “some”, or “many” or “most,”
This would confirm the sense that perhaps there is some sort of trade-off in language acquisition. While we as humans are miraculously able to begin to pick up on this implicatures and other subtleties that make such a difference in how we efficiently and naturally communicate, it creates surely an obstacle in later expanding or altering the, as may be needed in second language learning, since adults clearly do understand (as mentioned by the Stiller article) some kind of scales and scalar implicature (at least from the English framework, in this case).
Another thought is that this idea may also explain in part why so much of elementary education is focused on vocabulary and second-language higher ed is focused on issues like this, of grammar and syntax meaning. As children have no previous conceptions or understanding of scales and the like, they are able to pick up on these as they learn new words with which to use them. Adults, however, will need to put a focus on adjusting to new scales and other syntactical subtleties to express the vocabulary they gain along the way.
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