Does hearing "and" help children understand "or"? Insights into scales and relevance from the acquisition of disjunction in child Romanian
Adina Camelia Bleotu, Mara Panaitescu, Gabriela Bîlbîie, Alexandre Cremers, Andreea Nicolae, Anton Benz, Lyn Tieu
September 2024 

Children are known to derive more implicatures when the required alternative is made salient through contrast or contextually relevant through a story or Question Under Discussion. We investigated the exclusivity implicature of three disjunctions ("sau" ‘or’, "sau. . . sau", "fie. . . fie" ‘either. . . or’) in child Romanian, an understudied language in the previous literature. Three experiments reveal that the mere presence of the stronger alternative, that is, simply hearing unrelated conjunctive statements in the course of the experiment, is not enough to boost implicatures. Rather, implicatures increase as a result of both access to alternatives and contextual relevance (expressed through conjunctive questions such as "Did the hen push the train and the boat?"). Interestingly, the boost in implicatures was observed only for "sau"-based disjunctions, not for "fie. . . fie", which we conjecture may be due to children treating the latter as ambiguous between disjunction and conjunction.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008610 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Submitted
keywords:	disjunction, first language acquisition, romanian, implicatures, relevance, alternatives, experimental pragmatics, semantics
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