Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigate the interpretation of disjunction in child and adult Romanian via a replication of Tieu et al. (2017). Specifically, we target the simple disjunction 'sau' ‘or’ (with two intonation patterns: neutral and marked), and the complex disjunction markers 'sau…sau' and 'fie…fie' ‘either…or’. In a predictive Truth Value Judgment Task, participants evaluated a puppet’s disjunctive guesses ('The hen pushed the bus or the plane') after seeing the outcome. Adults assigned predominantly exclusive interpretations to both simple and complex disjunctions ('The hen pushed only one'). Children, however, generally interpreted 'sau' (with both intonational patterns) and 'sau…sau' inclusively (The hen pushed one and possibly both), while they interpreted 'fie…fie' conjunctively ('The hen pushed both'). It would appear that at an initial developmental stage, morphological/prosodic markedness does not affect children’s interpretation of disjunction. We discuss several possible accounts for the observed variation among complex disjunctions in child Romanian.