Children interpret some disjunctions conjunctively: Evidence from child Romanian

Studies show that adults interpret simplex disjunction ("The mouse carried an apple or anorange") inclusively ('The mouse carried one, possibly both') or exclusively ('The mouse carried one butnot both'), while they generally interpret complex disjunction (e.g., "either. . . or") exclusively. Children,however, tend to be inclusive or conjunctive ('The mouse carried both') with simplex and complexdisjunctions alike. While previous studies focused on one simplex and one complex disjunction, thepresent study investigates multiple simplex disjunctions (neutral and prosodically marked "sau") andcomplex disjunctions ("sau. . . sau", "fie. . . fie") in child Romanian. We ask whether children’s conjunctiveinterpretation of disjunction is an experimental artifact that arises in contexts where the disjunctivestatement mentions all visible objects in the display, in which case it should disappear in contextswhere the disjunctive statement is made more informative. We also ask what role prosodic andmorphological markedness play in the interpretation of disjunction. We conducted two Truth ValueJudgment Tasks in prediction mode. In Experiment 1, the visual displays contained two objects,and the disjunctive test sentences mentioned both; while adults were exclusive, children respondedin a conjunctive manner to "fie. . . fie", but were inclusive elsewhere. In Experiment 2, the visualdisplays contained two additional unmentioned objects; children were inclusive with "sau"-baseddisjunctions, showing no sensitivity to prosodic/morphological markedness, but a considerablenumber of children persisted in their conjunctive behaviour with "fie. . . fie". Our findings supportthe view that, at least for some disjunctions, the conjunctive interpretation is a genuine semanticinterpretation in development.