Children interpret some disjunctions conjunctively: Evidence from child Romanian
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Studies show that adults interpret simple forms of disjunction (The mouse carried an apple or an orange) inclusively (The mouse carried one, possibly both) or exclusively (The mouse carried one but not both), while they generally interpret complex disjunction (e.g. either…or) exclusively (Tieu et al. 2017; Nicolae et al. 2025). Children, however, who tend to interpret simple forms of disjunction inclusively or conjunctively (The mouse carried both) (Paris 1973; Braine and Rumain 1981; Singh et al. 2016; Huang and Crain 2020; Skordos et al. 2020), reportedly interpret complex disjunctions in the same way (Tieu et al. 2017; see also Sauerland and Yatsushiro 2018). While previous studies have focused on one simple and one complex disjunction (e.g., Tieu et al. 2017; Sauerland and Yatsushiro 2018), the present study investigates multiple simple disjunctions (neutral and prosodically marked sau) and complex disjunctions (sau…sau, fie…fie) in child Romanian. We ask whether children’s conjunctive interpretation of disjunction is an experimental artifact that arises in contexts where the disjunctive statement mentions all visible objects in the display (and is thus potentially underinformative). If so, then this interpretation should disappear in contexts where the disjunctive statement is made more informative. We also ask what role prosodic and morphological markedness play in the interpretation of disjunction. We conducted two Truth Value Judgment Tasks in prediction mode in order to address these questions. In Experiment 1, the visual displays contained two objects, and the disjunctive test sentences mentioned both. While adults were exclusive, children were mostly inclusive with sau-based disjunctions, but they were conjunctive and inclusive with fie…fie. In Experiment 2, the visual displays contained two additional unmentioned objects. Children were primarily inclusive with sau-based disjunctions, showing no sensitivity to prosodic/morphological markedness, but there was also evidence for conjunctive interpretations from children who oscillated between interpretations. Importantly, while children were less conjunctive with fie…fie in Experiment 2 compared to Experiment 1, a considerable number of conjunctive responses were still observed. Our findings support the view that the conjunctive interpretation, albeit not the dominant one, is nonetheless a genuine semantic/pragmatic interpretation in development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".