When interpreting disjunctive sentences of the form ‘A or B,’ young children have been reported to differ from adults in two ways. First, children have been reported to interpret disjunction inclusively rather than exclusively, accepting ‘A or B’ in con- texts in which both A and B are true (Gualmini, Crain, Meroni, Chierchia & Guasti 2001; Chierchia, Crain, Guasti & Thornton 2001). Second, some children have been reported to interpret disjunction conjunctively, rejecting ‘A or B’ in contexts in which only one of the disjuncts is true (Paris 1973; Braine & Rumain 1981; Chierchia, Guasti, Gualmini, Meroni, Crain & Foppolo 2004; Singh, Wexler, Astle, Kamawar & Fox 2015). In this paper, we extend the investigation of children’s interpretation of disjunction to include both simple and complex forms of disjunction, in two typologically unrelated languages: French and Japanese. First, given that complex disjunctions have been argued to give rise to obligatory exclusivity inferences (Spector 2014), we investigated whether the obligatoriness of the inference would play a role in the acquisition of the exclusive interpretation. Second, using a paradigm that makes the use of disjunc- tion felicitous, we aimed to establish whether the finding of conjunctive interpretations would be replicated for both simple and complex forms of disjunction, and in languages other than English. The main findings from our experiment are that both French- and Japanese-speaking children interpreted the simple and complex disjunctions either in- clusively or conjunctively; in contrast, adults generally accessed exclusive readings of both disjunctions. We argue that our results lend further support to the proposal put forth in Singh et al. (2015), according to which the reason some children compute conjunctive meanings while adults compute exclusive meanings is that the two groups differ in their respective sets of alternatives for disjunction. Crucially, adults access conjunction as an alternative to disjunction, and compute exclusive interpretations; in contrast, children access only the individual disjuncts as alternatives, and therefore either interpret the disjunction literally or compute conjunctive inferences. More gen- erally, our findings can be explained quite naturally within recent proposals according to which children differ from adults in the computation of scalar inferences because they are more restricted than adults in the set of scalar alternatives they can access (Barner, Brooks & Bale 2011; Tieu, Romoli, Zhou & Crain 2015b, among others).

中文翻译：

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论法语和日语中替代词在简单与复杂析取中的作用

据报道，当解释“ A或B”形式的析取句时，幼儿与成年人在两个方面有所不同。首先，据报道儿童会接受包容性而非排他性的解释，在A和B都为真的上下文中接受“ A或B”（Gualmini，Crain，Meroni，Chierchia和Guasti，2001； Chierchia，Crain，Guasti和桑顿（2001）。其次，据报道，有些孩子会用连词来解释分词，在只有其中一个分词为真的情况下会拒绝“ A或B”（巴黎1973；布赖恩和鲁曼1981；基耶基亚，瓜斯提，古拉米尼，梅罗尼，克林和福波洛2004 ; Singh，Wexler，Astle，Kamawar和Fox，2015年）。在本文中，我们将儿童对析取的解释的研究扩展到包括简单和复杂形式的析取，用两种在语言上无关的语言：法语和日语。首先，鉴于已经提出复杂的析取关系导致强制性排他性推论（Spector 2014），我们研究了推论的强制性是否会在获取排他性解释中发挥作用。其次，我们使用一种适合使用析取的范式，旨在确定是否可以将析取解译的结果复制为简单和复杂的析取形式，以及英语以外的其他语言。我们的实验的主要发现是，讲法语和日语的孩子都将包容性或结合性解释了简单和复杂的析取关系。相比之下，成年人通常会获得两种析取词的专有读物。我们认为我们的结果进一步支持了Singh等人提出的建议。（2015年），据此，有些孩子计算连词的意思，而成年人计算排他的意思的原因是，这两组在各自的析取选择集上有所不同。至关重要的是，成年人可以使用连词作为析取的替代方法，并计算排他性解释；相比之下，孩子只能访问单独的析取词作为替代，因此可以从字面上解释析取词或计算析取词。一般而言，我们的发现可以在最近的提议中很自然地解释，根据该提议，儿童在计算标量推论上与成年人不同，因为在可访问的标量替代方案集合中，儿童比成年人受限制得多（Barner，Brooks＆Bale 2011；Tieu，Romali，Zhou和Crain 2015b等）。