Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

At first glance, children’s word learning appears to be mostly a problem of learning words like dog and run. However, it is small words like and and or that enable the construction of complex combinatorial language. How do children learn the meaning of these function words? Using transcripts of parent- child interactions, we investigate the cues in child-directed speech that can inform the interpretation and acquisition of the connective or which has a particularly challenging semantics. Study 1 finds that, despite its low overall frequency, children can use or close to parents’ rate by age 4, in some speech acts. Study 2 uses annotations of a subset of parent-child interac- tions to show that disjunctions in child-directed speech are ac- companied by reliable cues to the correct interpretation (ex- clusive vs. inclusive). We present a decision-tree model that learns from a handful of annotated examples to correctly pre- dict the interpretation of a disjunction. These studies suggest that conceptual and prosodic cues in child-directed speech can provide information for the acquisition of functional categories like disjunction.