Adults’ and Children’s Comprehension of Linguistic Disjunction

Abstract

Disjunction has played a major role in advancing theories of logic, language, and cognition, featuring as the centerpiece of debates on the origins and development of logical thought. Recent studies have argued that due to non-adult-like pragmatic reasoning, preschool children’s comprehension of linguistic disjunction differs from adults in two ways. First, children are more likely to interpret “or” as “and” (conjunctive interpretations); Second, children are more likely to consider a disjunction as inclusive (lack of exclusivity implicatures). We tested adults and children’s comprehension of disjunction in existential sentences using two and three-alternative forced choice tasks, and analyzed children’s spontaneous verbal reactions prior to their forced-choice judgments. Overall our results are compatible with studies that suggest children understand the basic truth-conditional semantics of disjunction. Children did not interpret “or” as “and”, supporting studies that argue conjunctive interpretations are due to task demands. In addition, even though our forced-choice tasks suggest children interpreted disjunction as inclusive, spontaneous verbal reactions showed that children were sensitive to the adult-like pragmatics of disjunction. Theoretically, these studies provide evidence against previous developmental accounts, and lend themselves to two alternative hypotheses. First, that preschool children’s pragmatic knowledge is more adult-like than previously assumed, but forced-choice judgments are not sensitive enough to capture this knowledge. Second, children may have the knowledge of the relevant lexical scale themselves, but be uncertain whether a new speaker also has this knowledge (mutual knowledge of the scale).

Learning the Meanings of Function Words From Grounded Language Using a Visual Question Answering Model

“…Similarly, early nativist approaches argued that children's early understanding of or was as a simple choice, making it compatible with exclusivity (Neimark, 1970). Following Grice's (1975) proposal that exclusive interpretations are the result of generalized conversational implicature, others have instead advocated that or is underlyingly inclusive and that children eventually learn exclusive or via pragmatic reasoning (Chierchia, Crain, Guasti, Gualmini, & Meroni, 2001; Chierchia et al., 2004; Jasbi & Frank, 2021). Interestingly, some have also found the children often mistakenly interpret or as conjunction (Braine & Rumain, 1981; Singh, Wexler, Astle‐Rahim, Kamawar, & Fox, 2016; Tieu et al., 2017), though it has been suggested that this finding may be an artifact to the specific experimental task designs used in these studies (Paris, 1973; Skordos, Feiman, Bale, & Barner, 2020).…”

Default biases in the interpretation of English negation, conjunction, and disjunction

“…However, it is also possible that part of the dissatisfaction was due to ignorance implicatures: an utterance of disjunction is odd when the speaker and the addressee already know what is true. Jasbi & Frank (2021) tested children and adults' comprehension of disjunction in similar existential sentences to Chevallier et al (2008) using binary and ternary forced-choice truth-value judgments. In the binary task (wrong vs. right) the majority of participants provided an inclusive interpretation (about 80%) but in the ternary task participants chose the intermediate option of "kinda right" more often, which could be interpreted as exclusive.…”