The Semantics and Pragmatics of Logical Connectives: Adults' and Children's Interpretations of And and Or in a Guessing Game

The development of the ubiquitous logical connectives and and or provides a window into the role of semantics and pragmatics in children’s linguistic development. Previous research has suggested that adults and children might differ in their interpretation of or in two ways. First, unlike adults, children might interpret or as logical conjunction, akin to and. Second, children might interpret or as inclusive disjunction while adults interpret it as exclusive. We report experimental studies that probe interpretations of and and or in adults and children using truth value judgements as well as children’s spontaneous linguistic feedback. Both truth judgements and linguistic feedback showed that four-year-olds do not interpret or as and. While children’s truth judgments suggested that they did not derive exclusivity implicatures, however, their corrective feedback showed signs of sensitivity to the implicature, suggesting that the truth value judgement task could have underestimated children’s pragmatic competence. More generally, four-yearolds’ interpretation of logical connectives may not be as different from adults as previously supposed.