Children interpret disjunction as conjunction: Consequences for theories of implicature and child development

Children's knowledge of free choice inferences

“…In particular, we formulate an hypothesis based on a suggestion by Chemla & Bott (2014) and elsewhere in the literature, namely that children have access to a restricted set of alternatives (Singh et al 2012;Chemla & Bott 2014;Reinhart 2006;Barner et al 2011). …”

“…There we formulate a hypothesis about the observed behavioral differences. Our hypothesis is based on children's knowledge of alternatives, following suggestions in the literature, put forward by Chemla & Bott (2014) and by others (Gualmini et al 2001;Chierchia et al 2001;Singh et al 2012;Reinhart 2006;Barner et al 2011). We then sketch the predictions that this hypothesis makes, and how we are proceeding to test these predictions.…”

“…Now, putting together the two ingredients, we can formulate the hypothesis as in (40) (see Gualmini et al 2001;Chierchia et al 2001;Reinhart 2006;Singh et al 2012;Barner et al 2011;Chemla & Bott 2014).…”

“…A different answer is to say that they do compute scalar implicatures, but these are simply different from those of adults. This second version is defended and tested further in Singh et al 2012. In both cases, the idea is that for something of the form in (49) children can only access the alternatives in (50) while adults have the set in (51).…”

“…The observation by Singh et al (2012) is that if we apply the recursive exhaustification mechanism by Fox (2007) (see Appendix A) to (49) and the children's alternatives in (50a) we obtain the conjunctive inference in (53). On the other hand, if we do it to (49) and the adults' alternatives in (51), we obtain the regular exclusivity inference in (53).…”