Children interpret some disjunctions conjunctively: Evidence from child Romanian

Romanian children have been shown to rarely interpret the complex disjunction sau…sau ‘either...or’ (as in sau trenul sau barca ‘either the train or the boat’) exclusively (that is, as ‘only one, not both’) in Truth Value Judgment Tasks. Instead, children often favor an inclusive interpretation (‘one or both’), or a conjunctive interpretation (‘both, not just one’) (Bleotu et al. 2023, 2024a). Such findings contrast with those from Romanian adults, who consistently interpret this disjunction exclusively. In this study, we investigate whether children interpret sau...sau more exclusively in a Coloring Book Task (CBT), given previous evidence that children’s performance is more adult-like in tasks involving coloring rather than in truth value judgment tasks. In line with this expectation, we observed an increase in the number of exclusive-responding children compared to previous findings for Romanian. However, it is important to highlight that most children still did not interpret the disjunction exclusively, indicating ongoing challenges with the interpretation of disjunction around the age of five years.

This study investigates three- to five-year-old children's interpretation of disjunction in sentences like 'The dog reached the finish line before the turtle or the bunny'. English disjunction has a conjunctive interpretation in such sentences ('The dog reached the finish line before the turtle and before the bunny'). This interpretation conforms with classical logic. Mandarin disjunction ('huozhe') can take scope over 'before' ('zai … zhiqian'), so the same sentence can mean 'The dog reached the finish line before the turtle or before the bunny (I don't know which)'. If children are guided by adult input in the acquisition of sentence meanings, English- and Mandarin-speaking children should assign different interpretations to such sentences. If children are guided by logical principles, then children acquiring either language should initially assign the conjunctive interpretation of disjunction. A truth-value judgment task was used to test this prediction and English- and Mandarin-speaking children were found to behave similarly.

A recent theory provides a unified cross-linguistic analysis of the interpretations that are assigned to expressions for disjunction, Negative Polarity Items, Free Choice Items, and the non-interrogative uses of wh-phrases in languages such as Mandarin Chinese. If this approach is on the right track, children should be expected to demonstrate similar patterns in the acquisition of these linguistic expressions. Previous research has found that, by age four, children have acquired the knowledge that both the existential indefinite renhe “any” and wh-words in Mandarin Chinese are interpreted as Negative Polarity Items when they are bound by downward entailing operators, but the same expressions are interpreted as Free Choice Items (with a conjunctive interpretation) when they are bound by deontic modals (Mandarin keyi) or by the Mandarin adverbial quantifier dou “all”. The present study extends this line of research to the Mandarin disjunction word huozhe. A Truth Value Judgment Task was used to investigate the possibility that disjunction phrases that are bound by the adverbial quantifier dou generate a conjunctive interpretation in the grammars of Mandarin-speaking 4-year-old children. The findings confirmed this prediction. We discuss the implications of the findings for linguistic theory and for language learnability.

In a body of empirical research, it has been observed that young children from across different linguistic communities adhered to a particular type of nonadult interpretation of disjunction: They appear to interpret disjunction conjunctively. Through three experiments with Japanese-speaking preschoolers, we investigate the source of this nonadult behavior. Specifically, we ask whether children’s conjunctive interpretation of disjunction in negative sentences can be reduced to strengthening via implicature. To test this possibility, we presented Japanese children with test sentences in which the crucial disjunctive NP was located in different syntactic positions: accusative-marked object (Experiment 1), nominative-marked subject (Experiment 2), and nominative-marked object (Experiment 3). The results showed that children systematically altered their interpretations of disjunction according to its syntactic position in the test sentence. Importantly, they consistently accepted adultlike disjunctive interpretations of the test sentences in Experiments 2 and 3, but they showed adherence to the conjunctive interpretation in Experiment 1. These behaviors cannot be explained by the strengthening account, suggesting that children’s conjunctive interpretation of disjunction in negative sentences is due to their nonadult scope assignment.

According to a recent proposal, children license a conjunctive inference for statements with disjunction even without a licensing expression that adults require, e.g., the deontic modal verb is allowed to (Singh, Wexler, Astle, Kamawar, & Fox, 2016; Tieu et al., 2017). However, the rates of children’s conjunctive inferences vary considerably across studies, which may be due to the different experimental tasks and materials. Using a Truth Value Judgment Task (Crain & Thornton, 1998), the present study systematically investigated children’s interpretation of disjunctive sentences with and without a deontic modal verb. It was found that children computed conjunctive inferences only in sentences with the deontic modal verb. We discuss the possible reasons for the varying findings of children’s interpretation of disjunction in previous studies.

This study investigates the sources of the possible interpretations of negative disjunctive statements (e.g. Girafa nu a cules ghiocelul sau trandafirul ‘The giraffe did not pick the snowdrop or the rose’) in Romanian children and adults. Previous research highlights cross-linguistic variation among adults: English-speaking adults allow both neither nor and not both interpretations, while Japanese-speaking adults only allow the not both interpretation. In contrast, children across a number of languages have been shown to prefer the stronger neither nor interpretation. We attempt to connect this area of research with studies showing that children interpret positive disjunctive statements (e.g. Girafa a cules ghiocelul sau trandafirul ‘The giraffe picked the snowdrop or the rose’) in an inclusive or conjunctive manner (and in particular with studies that argue that the conjunctive interpretation is the result of scalar strengthening). If the source of strong meanings across polarities is strengthening, then we expect the same children who prefer neither nor interpretations of negative disjunctive statements to be the same children who prefer conjunctive interpretations of positive disjunctive statements. We conducted a Truth Value Judgment Task (TVJT) with Romanian 5-year-old children and a group of adult controls to examine their behavior in negative and positive disjunctive statements and to investigate a possible positive correlation between strong interpretations across sentence polarities. Our results indicate that both groups behaved relatively similarly: in negative contexts, they predominantly favored the neither nor interpretation, while in positive contexts, they predominantly favored an inclusive interpretation. These results do not support a positive correlation between strong interpretations of positive and negative disjunctive statements. Instead, we argue that strong interpretations may have different sources in sentences of differing polarity, namely, strengthening in positive statements and scope in negative ones.

This study examined 4- to 5-year-old English-speaking children’s inter-pretations of sentences containing negation, the universal quantifier, and disjunction. Disjunction is assigned two different meanings in such sentences depending on its position in surface syntax: in the subject phrase of ‘not every’ (e.g., not every passenger who ordered chicken or beef became ill), a disjunctive meaning is assigned to disjunction (e.g. at least one passenger who ordered chicken OR at least one passenger who ordered beef became ill); in the predicate phrase of ‘not every’ (e.g., not every passenger who became ill ordered chicken or beef), a conjunctive meaning is assigned (e.g., at least one passenger who became ill did not order chicken AND did not order beef). If children bring knowledge of combinatory logical principles to the task of language acquisition, then they should be sensitive to this asymmetry. We tested this prediction using a truth-value judgment task.

ABSTRACTIt has been proposed that children differ from adults in that children license a conjunctive inference to disjunctive sentences that lack any licensing expression. The proposal is that children infer “A and B” from sentences of the form “A or B.” Although children’s conjunctive interpretations of disjunction have been reported in some studies, they have not been observed in other studies. This study investigates one possible source of the different findings, which is the presence or absence of objects that are contextually introduced, beyond those mentioned in the test sentences. Using a Truth Value Judgment Task, we conducted three experiments with preschool Mandarin-speaking children and a control group of adults. Test sentences in Experiment 1 included disjunction and a deontic modal verb, and the contexts only included objects that were mentioned in the test sentences. In Experiment 2, the deontic modal verb was omitted from the test sentences. Experiment 3 presented the same sentences as Experiment 2, but the contexts included additional objects beyond those mentioned in the test sentences. Both children and adults assigned a conjunctive inference to the test sentences in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, with no deontic verbs and no contextually introduced objects, a subset of children computed conjunctive inferences, whereas none of the adults did. In Experiment 3, neither group made a conjunctive inference. The findings reveal that entities in nonlinguistic contexts influence children’s understanding of logical expressions. Moreover, preschool children already have linguistic knowledge that modal verbs license conjunctive inferences for sentences with disjunction.

This article discusses a variant of the Truth Value Judgment Task (TVJT), which I call the uncertainty mode. In a TVJT experiment conducted with children, a puppet manipulated by an experimenter presents the test sentences to the participant. In the uncertainty mode of TVJT, the crucial test sentences are presented as a guess regarding what has happened in an experimental story, rather than as a description or as a prediction. The crucial feature of this experimental design is that the experimental story employs a certain structure so that the puppet can access only incomplete information at the time when he provides the test sentence. This methodology allows the researcher to create a pragmatic context in which negation and uncertainty expressions, such as disjunction or indefinite pronouns, can be felicitously used. I will review the background from which the uncertainty mode emerged, as well as the advantages of this variant of the TVJT.

It is well known that a fuzzy rule base can be interpreted in different ways. From a logical point of view, the conjunctive interpretation is preferred, while from a practical point of view, the disjunctive interpretation has been dominantly present. Each of these interpretations results in a specific fuzzy relation that models the fuzzy rule base. Basic interpolation requirements naturally suggest a corresponding inference mechanism: the direct image for the conjunctive interpretation and the subdirect image for the disjunctive interpretation. Interpolation then corresponds to solvability of some system of fuzzy relational equations. In this paper, we show that other types of fuzzy relations, which are closely related to Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) models, are of major interest as well. These fuzzy relations are based on addition and multiplication only, from which we get the name arithmetic fuzzy models. Under some mild requirements, these fuzzy relations turn out to be solutions of the same systems of fuzzy relational equations. The impact of these results is both theoretical and practical: There exist simple solutions to systems of fuzzy relational equations, other than the extremal solutions that have received all the attention so far, which are, moreover, easy to implement.

In a sentence where the disjunctionhuo‘or’ appears under the negationmei‘no’ (e.g.:Ta mei chi qingjiao huo qiezi. ‘He did not eat green peppers or eggplants.’), the sentence is globally ambiguous between the conjunctive interpretation and the disjunctive interpretation. The primary goal of this study is to investigate if there is a default meaning for simple negative statements containinghuo‘or’. Data collected from the self-paced region-by-region reading experiment indicated that the participants consistently preferred the conjunctive interpretation. Additionally, in the conjunction-biased condition where the sentences turned out to favor the disjunctive interpretations at the end, there was reading time penalty at the last region of the sentences and participants spent significantly longer time judging the appropriateness of those sentences. Contrary toJing’s (2008)assertion that both disjunction and conjunction readings are equally prominent in an out-of-the-blue context, the results from the quantitative data revealed that the conjunction reading is the default meaning for simple negative statements containinghuo‘or’. The findings of the current experiment provide essential implications to the study of child language acquisition. Specifically, we argue that understanding the adults’ linguistic patterns is a prerequisite to the study of children’s language acquisition patterns.

Information in databases can be imperfect and this imperfection has several forms and causes. In some cases, a single value should be stored, but it is (partially) unknown. The uncertainty about which value to store leads to the aforementioned imperfection. In temporal databases, uncertainty can arise, concerning which temporal notion needs to be stored. Because in temporal databases, temporal notions influence the consistency with which the database models the reality, this uncertainty has a direct impact on the consistency of the model. To represent this temporal uncertainty, previous works have adapted fuzzy sets with conjunctive interpretation, an approach that might prove misleading. This work presents a model that represents the uncertainty using possibility and necessity measures, which are fuzzy sets with disjunctive interpretations.

This study examines types and characteristics of data collection tasks used in studies on scope ambiguity in English involving a universally quantified noun phrase and negation, and investigates any differences in comprehension patterns across studies using different tasks. Since Musolino’s seminal 1998 study using a truth value judgment task, several other studies on English scope ambiguity have used the same task type or variations on it, while others have tested different tasks. Through a keyword search of relevant databases, the present study found a total of 13 studies dealing with the topic of universal quantification and negation in English published since 1998. Based on tasks’ key characteristics and how they were conducted, seven different basic task types were identified. A comparison of the results of the studies found a difference in the overall comprehension patterns of English native speakers for sentences containing a universally quantified noun phrase in subject position between the truth value judgment task with one type of context story and the other tasks. The results are discussed in terms of their methodological implications, and some suggestions for further research from methodological perspectives are provided.

The past 15 years have seen increasing experimental investigations of core pragmatic questions in the ever more active and lively field of experimental pragmatics. Within experimental pragmatics, many of the core questions have relied on the operationalization of the theoretical notion of “implicature rate.” Implicature rate based results have informed the work on acquisition, online processing, and scalar diversity, inter alia. Implicature rate has typically been quantified as the proportion of “pragmatic” judgments in two-alternative forced choice truth value judgment tasks. Despite its theoretical importance, this linking hypothesis from implicature rate to behavioral responses has never been extensively tested. Here we show that two factors dramatically affect the “implicature rate” inferred from truth value judgment tasks: (a) the number of responses provided to participants; and (b) the linking hypothesis about what constitutes a “pragmatic” judgment. We argue that it is time for the field of experimental pragmatics to engage more seriously with its foundational assumptions about how theoretical notions map onto behaviorally measurable quantities, and present a sketch of an alternative linking hypothesis that derives behavior in truth value judgment tasks from probabilistic utterance expectations.

Experimental research on the processing of Scalar Implicatures (SIs) relies on behavioral tasks that purport to measure the rate at which scalar implicatures are computed within an experimental paradigm. Two paradigms, the Truth Value Judgment Task (TVJT) (Gordon, 1998; Crain & Thornton, 2000) and the Picture Selection Task (PST) (Gerken & Shady, 1998) have dominated the experimental pragmatics literature; yet the effects of task choice on implicature rate have remained underexplored. Here we report the results of three studies testing participants in the TVJT and the PST using three different linguistic scales in English: “ad-hoc”, “or-and”, and “some-all”. In the first experiment, the task variation was manipulated within subjects while in the second experiment, it was manipulated between subjects. The third experiment examined a variant of the PST called the Hidden Card Task (HCT) which is increasingly used in the context of priming research (Bott & Chemla, 2016). We found that the estimated rate of scalar implicature computation varied noticeably between different tasks. This suggests that the experimental paradigm itself has a significant impact on our estimates of the implicature rate for a given linguistic scale, and thus, researchers studying scalar implicatures need to carefully consider the effect of experimental paradigms in experimental design and the interpretation of their results.