On the sources of strong interpretations in children. Insights from plain and modal disjunctive statements

Abstract

Studies show Mandarin-speaking children interpret modalized disjunctive statements like X is allowed to do P or Q (◇(P∨Q)) with free choice (FC) inferences like X is allowed to do P and X is allowed to do Q (◇P∧◇Q), while struggling with scalar implicatures with non-modalized disjunction (Tieu et al. 2016). However, recently Cochard et al. (2024) argued that some children only seemingly derive FC: they actually interpret ◇(P∨Q) as ◇(P∧Q), given their conjunctive understanding of non-modalized disjunction. We extend this investigation to Romanian, an understudied language. We build on Cochard et al.'s (2024) study by comparing the same children’s performance on non-modalized and modalized utterances. We ran both an Implicature Task and a FC Task, counterbalanced for order (Adults: 66, 5-year-old Children: 60). We found evidence for Cochard et al. (2024)’s hypothesis: some of the children conjunctive in FC were also conjunctive in the Implicature Task. The current findings from child Romanian suggest the existence of at least two sources of children’s interpretation of modalized disjunctive statements: a genuine FC inference reading (◇P∧◇Q) and an AND reading (◇(P∧Q)).