The some and only

The two articles this week discussed the difference between age groups in making accurate implications phrases that describe characteristics of a certain context. The Barner article explored the effect of the word only on pragmatic inferences while the Stiller article investigates the accuracy of inferences given no scale.

These articles remind me of my beginning studies of French. When the linguistic description of a situation was too complicated or too nuanced for me to ascertain the full meaning of the context and it was hard to think of an alternative means of expressing the situation. I believe as Barner suggested that “a processing limit explains failure to access alternatives.”  I for example would not have been able to discern the alternative to an “only some” statement because I had not mastered enough of the lexicon yet. However, as seen in the Still article a point of reference would help me understand contextual alternatives even without a linguistic understanding.  Also, we treat the word only a bit differently than the French do. In French, the word only is considered almost like a negation (ne…que) and if this mindset were translated to English I believe this would explain why children get confused in the three-object task when only is applied. It may seem to children that the word only excludes the other true information about the situation (the cow and dog are sleeping but the cat is still there too).  

Overall, it seems that the situation informs a child’s lexical understanding and vice versa. The scales provided filler for gaps in children’s linguistic schemas indicating that they both work together to build on their working understanding of both their language and environment in the same way that second language learners begin to master new languages.