Accessing the Unsaid: The Role of Scalar Alternatives in Childrenâs Pragmatic Inference
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 suggest that not all the toys are on the table.Although this difference is sometimes attributed to children's difficulties in processing and pragmatic understanding, this paper explores the hypothesis that children fail to compute scalar implicatures because they lack knowledge about relevant lexical alternatives to words like "some".Four-year-olds were shown pictures in which two objects fit a description and a third object did not, and were asked to judge the truth value of statements that relied on context-independent alternatives (e.g.only some of the toys are on the table) or contextual alternatives (e.g.only the drum and the ball are on the table).Children computed scalar implicatures only in the case of contextual alternatives, and only when the statements were grammatically strengthened, supporting the hypothesis that children's difficulties with scalar implicature result from a lack of knowledge of the relevant alternatives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".