Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The relation between logical reasoning and language development is debated. We addressed this issue by focusing on disjunctive reasoning (A V B; exclude A; therefore, B) and the acquisition of the connective "or" in 3-year-old children, comparing non-verbal and linguistic contexts. In Experiment 1, children completed first a non-verbal inferential task, and then succeeded in a linguistic inferential task, using "or" to define a set of alternatives (A V B) and visual information to exclude one and infer the other (exclude A; therefore, B). In Experiment 2, children instead completed a non-inferential control task followed by the same linguistic inferential task: although they succeeded in using visual information, they failed to use "or" to identify the relevant set of alternatives. Therefore, children who had previously engaged in non-verbal disjunctive reasoning showed a better comprehension of "or". These findings suggest that preverbal inferential abilities support the early acquisition of linguistic disjunction.