More than one way to free choice: A view from child Romanian
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studies show that children draw from modalized disjunctive statements of the structure X is allowed to do P or Q (♢(P ∨Q)) a Free Choice (FC) inference, namely X is allowed to do P and X is allowed to do Q (♢P ∧♢Q). Their ability to compute free choice inferences is surprising in light of their well-known difficulties with scalar implicatures involving non modalized disjunction (Tieu, Romoli, et al. 2016), particularly on accounts that unify free choice inferences and scalar implicatures (e.g., Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002; Chierchia 2013). Recent work by Cochard, van Hout, and Demirdache (2024b), however, argues that some children only seemingly derive free choice: these children actually interpret ♢(P ∨Q) as ♢(P ∧Q), which follows from their conjunctive understanding of non-modalized disjunction. In the present study, we extend the investigation by comparing the same children’s performance on non-modalized and modalized utterances in Romanian, an understudied language. Specifically, we tested the same group of 5-year-old monolingual Romanian-speaking children and adult controls, balanced for order. Our findings provide partial evidence for Cochard, van Hout, and Demirdache (2024b)’s hypothesis: some children were inclusive with non-modalized disjunction, and appeared to derive genuine free choice on the free choice task, while some children indeed exhibited conjunctive interpretations in both tasks.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.042 | 0.006 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".