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The Semantics and Pragmatics of Logical Connectives: Adults’ and Children’sInterpretations of And and Or in a Guessing Game

Abstract

The development of the ubiquitous logical connectives and andor provides a window into the role of semantics and pragmat-ics in children’s linguistic development. Previous research hassuggested that adults and children might differ in their interpre-tation of or in two ways. First, unlike adults, children mightinterpret or as logical conjunction, akin to and. Second, chil-dren might interpret or as inclusive disjunction while adultsinterpret it as exclusive. We report experimental studies thatprobe interpretations of and and or in adults and children us-ing truth value judgements as well as children’s spontaneouslinguistic feedback. Both truth judgements and linguistic feed-back showed that four-year-olds do not interpret or as and.While children’s truth judgments suggested that they did notderive exclusivity implicatures, however, their corrective feed-back showed signs of sensitivity to the implicature, suggestingthat the truth value judgement task could have underestimatedchildren’s pragmatic competence. More generally, four-year-olds’ interpretation of logical connectives may not be as differ-ent from adults as previously supposed.

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