Quantity implicature and access to scalar alternatives in language acquisition
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
When faced with a sentence like "Some of the toys are on the table," adults, but not preschoolers, compute a scalar implicature, taking the sentence to imply that not all the toys are on the table. This paper explores the hypothesis that children fail to compute scalar implicatures because they lack knowledge of the relevant scalar alternatives to words like "some." Four-year-olds were shown pictures in which three out of three objects fit a description (e.g., three animals reading), and were asked to evaluate statements that relied on context-independent alternatives (e.g., knowing that "all" is an alternative to "some" for the utterance "Some of the animals are reading") or contextual alternatives (e.g., knowing that the set of all three visible animals is an alternative to a set of two for the utterance "Only the cat and the dog are reading"). Children failed to reject the false statements containing context-independent scales even when the word "only" was used (e.g., "only some"), but correctly rejected equivalent statements containing contextual alternatives (e.g., "only the cat and dog"). These results support the hypothesis that children’s difficulties with scalar implicature are due to a failure to generate relevant alternatives for specific scales. Consequences for number word learning are also discussed.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it