When Implications Abound

This week's papers explored the idea of scalar implicatures, and the difficulty children have in understanding them properly. The problem really boils down to a question of shared knowledge. Children, as humans less experienced in the dealings of the world, have less knowledge and understanding about what is statistically rare and significant. One of the reasons they might do so poorly on scalar implicature tasks is that they have a different base understanding. For example, when someone uses the word "some," we have learned to assume that they would have said "all" if they could, and so we are to assume "not all."

After a thorough survey of literature on scalar implicature, Barner settles on a hypothesis similar to Stiller’s- implicatures involve many assumptions about state that we learn throughout life (for example not implying “not two” from the word “some). Children haven't learned these things, and therefore need contextual alternatives to fully understand some scalar implication.

This week’s papers, and particularly Barner’s mention that “encouraging children to actively search alternatives… might compensate for weak knowledge,” made me think back on my time in Ghana. My family and friends in Ghana spoke Twi. As I read the two papers, my mind wandered to the many times this past summer when I couldn't understand what was going on because of the amount of shared language specific knowledge there was between speakers. This reality was especially true when speaking in informal settings (like my cousins gossiping about something). As Barner mentions briefly, my understanding of the many implications in their speech was not because of limited processing power. Instead, it was the result of the baseline knowledge I did not share with other speakers.