The Limits of Contextual Independence

Overall, both of these readings are similar to one other because they are each related to linguistic implicature. Most importantly, they both serve to highlight one of the limits of lexical reasoning in children. Lexical reasoning may be limited when it is context-independent, and this happens even when the capacity for inference is already developed in a child.

For example, Experiment 1 in the reading titled Ad-hoc scalar implicature in adults and children by Stiller, Goodman, and Frank serves to demonstrate precisely this: children have a developed ability to identify implicatures in language and they demonstrate it when given the visual context of the situation; however, they have trouble dealing with the “lexical items” (the words themselves) and their scales. The same limit to lexical reasoning is evident in the reading titled Accessing the unsaid: The role of scalar alternatives in children’s pragmatic inference by Barner, Brooks, and Bale. In this reading, it is demonstrated that children have a much harder time reasoning with the word “only” when contextual alternatives are not provided than when they are. For instance, when no context was provided, children would continuously misjudge the number of animals that were sleeping (as in the 3-item case).

Both of these examples demonstrate that children routinely fail in detecting linguistic implicatures when dealing with context-independent situations. And in both cases, adults outperformed children. However, in the same way in which certain lexical processes are limited in children as compared to adults, I wonder whether for other situations, adults themselves have a limited ability to make sense of words when they’re not provided with contextual information or visual examples. Children performed better when they were provided with the context that allowed them to more easily visualize or make sense of the situation at hand. Having said this, are there certain situations in which adults could significantly improve their lexical reasoning when provided with context or visual cues?

There are different cases that come to mind when I think of potential examples. One of them is a double or even triple negative. We might find ourselves confused if we hear someone say: “We can’t not go to the park”. However, it wouldn’t be tough to understand a visual that shows a person simply walking to the park, for that is precisely what the statement implies – “We can go to the park”. These and other cases demonstrate that in some situations, our lexical reasoning could appear compromised even when we understand the underlying processes that are taking place. I also wonder whether biases are in some way related to this – when we’re unconsciously biased, maybe we’re having trouble making sense of the lexical situation, even though, if we stop, think, and visualize, we might understand the underlying processes that are going on.