Project Stages
Timeline: Our main research activities will take place between October 1st, 2022 and September 30, 2024.
The Acquisition of Disjunction and the Alternative-based Account
The Truth Value Judgment Task: No explicit conjunction in the verbal context.
Across several languages, children have been found to consistently accept disjunctive statements in scenarios where adults find conjunctive statements more adequate (Tieu et al. 2016, 2017). We adopt the methodology used in Tieu et al. (2017) in order to determine whether the effect found in English and Japanese replicates in Romanian. Specifically, we will use a Truth Value Judgment Task (Crain & Thornton 1998, 2000) as a guessing game in order to evaluate children’s understanding of inclusive and exclusive disjunction.
The Truth Value Judgment Task: With explicit conjunction in the verbal context.
According to the Alternative-based hypothesis (Tieu et al., 2017, a.o.), it might be possible to increase the rate with which children derive exclusive disjunction implicatures by explicitly contrasting disjunctive statements with conjunctive alternatives, like Gǎina a ȋmpins (şi) autobuzul şi avionul (‘The hen pushed (both) the bus and the plane.’), thus activating the <or, and> scale (Horn, 1972). Thus, we expect children to perform in a more adult-like manner.
The Coloring Book Task: With explicit conjunction in the visual context and action required.
We increase the availability of the alternative by means of an act-out task in which participants perform an action in relation to a disjunctive statement. Children’s task will be to color the hen who pushed the bus or the plane. On the assumption that the Coloring Book Task is a more accurate methodological tool for testing children’s abilities (as also suggested by Zuckerman et al. 2016, Gerard et al. 2017, 2018, and Bleotu 2020), we expect children to be sensitive to the <or, and> scale (Horn 1972).
The Ternary Reward Task: With explicit conjunction and a Reward.
We test children’s understanding of disjunction through Katsos & Bishop’s (2011) Ternary Reward Task, a method which provided evidence that children do not lack the ability to derive scalar implicatures, but are sensitive to the difference between informative and underinformative statements. In the task, children have to reward characters with three types of strawberries: huge, big, or small, where huge strawberries are the best possible reward. Katsos & Bishop (2011), showed that, in scenarios where statements with all were true, children would reward underinformative statements with some with big strawberries, instead of huge ones. This sensitivity cannot be captured by a simple binary truth value judgment task. If children can derive exclusive disjunction implicatures, we expect them to reward underinformative disjunctive statements with a big strawberry rather than a huge one (which would correspond to a fully informative sentence).
The Interaction between Disjunction and Other Logical Operators (Modality, Negation)
DISJUNCTION AND MODALITY
We investigate experimentally whether Romanian children derive from a sentence such as Gǎina poate sǎ ȋmpingǎ autobuzul sau avionul ("The hen may push the bus or the plane') the free choice inferences Gǎina poate sǎ ȋmpingǎ autobuzul şi gǎina poate sǎ ȋmpingǎ avionul (" The hen may push the bus and the hen may push the plane"). Interestingly, previous studies show that children seem to be able to derive them while not being able to derive scalar implicatures with disjunction (Tieu et al., 2016). We expect a similar performance in the case of Romanian children. In addition, we will also investigate whether children derive parallel inferences with trebuie 'must'.
DISJUNCTION AND NEGATION
We look at negated disjunction statements such as 'Gǎina nu a ȋmpins autobuzul ori avionul' ('The hen pushed neither the bus nor the plane'), which is ambiguous between two readings: (i) a “narrow scope” reading, where the hen pushed neither of the two objects, and (ii) a “wide scope reading”, which generates an exclusivity implicature (Chierchia, 2013), where the hen pushed either the plane or the bus, but not both. Under the hypothesis that adults consider alternatives which are not explicitly made available, such as the nici…nici alternative (which , we expect that adults will prefer the wide scope reading irrespective of the type of task, while children might find it harder to generate exclusivity implicatures. However, based on Chierchia et al. (2001), who found that English-speaking children interpret statements with disjunction under negation as conjunctive interpretation 91.6% of the time, we might expect Romanian children to also be exclusive in their interpretations. The results will be particularly interesting given that, unlike Standard English, Romanian is a Negative Concord language (Zeijlstra, 2004), and marking negation on the disjunction connector(s) or not may have an effect upon children’s interpretations. More specifically, children may be more inclusive when negation is only marked on the verb and not marked on the disjunctive connector.
Disjunction and Agreement
We investigate experimentally how disjunction and agreement interact, and, in particular, how implicature-derivation can impact syntactic agreement patterns. Disjunction poses interesting problems given its compatibility with different agreement patterns (both singular and plural, see Peterson, 1986; Foppolo & Staub, 2020). We look at agreement preferences in the case of Romanian children and adults. We predict that adults will favor plural agreement for inclusive disjunction interpretations of sau ‘or’ and singular agreement for exclusive disjunction interpretations. Under the hypothesis that children initially understand disjunction inclusively or as coordination , we predict children to prefer plural agreement regardless of the type of disjunction.