Tomasz Klochowicz, Giorgio Sbardolini and Maria Aloni
Affiliation: University of Amsterdam
Category: Linguistics
Keywords: disjunction, acquisition, conjunctive readings, neglect-zero, cognitive bias
Date: Thursday 4th of September
Time: 17:30
Location: GSSR Plenary Hall (268)
View the full session: Cognitive Development
Adults usually interpret disjunction exclusively. Preschool children instead sometimes interpret disjunctions as conjunctions. Conjunctive readings persist under other operators, such as modalities and quantifiers. We propose to explain this behaviour by two independently motivated cognitive biases: 1. Neglect-zero (Aloni 2022) 2. No-split (Sbardolini 2025). We argue that children have more issues suspending the biases than adults. We claim that the conjunctive readings are independent of the ability to engage with alternative-based structures and hence do not constitute evidence against Chierchia’s claim that the ability to exhaustify is acquired late. Our theory predicts conjunctive interpretations to be simpler and to occur earlier than inclusive ones. This prediction is orthogonal to the exhaustifcation-based theories, which are committed to the claims that children compute recursive exhaustification and have access to the inclusive reading (parse) prior to the conjunctive one.