ABSTRACT

It has been proposed that children differ from adults in that children license a conjunctive inference to disjunctive sentences that lack any licensing expression. The proposal is that children infer “A and B” from sentences of the form “A or B.” Although children’s conjunctive interpretations of disjunction have been reported in some studies, they have not been observed in other studies. This study investigates one possible source of the different findings, which is the presence or absence of objects that are contextually introduced, beyond those mentioned in the test sentences. Using a Truth Value Judgment Task, we conducted three experiments with preschool Mandarin-speaking children and a control group of adults. Test sentences in Experiment 1 included disjunction and a deontic modal verb, and the contexts only included objects that were mentioned in the test sentences. In Experiment 2, the deontic modal verb was omitted from the test sentences. Experiment 3 presented the same sentences as Experiment 2, but the contexts included additional objects beyond those mentioned in the test sentences. Both children and adults assigned a conjunctive inference to the test sentences in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, with no deontic verbs and no contextually introduced objects, a subset of children computed conjunctive inferences, whereas none of the adults did. In Experiment 3, neither group made a conjunctive inference. The findings reveal that entities in nonlinguistic contexts influence children’s understanding of logical expressions. Moreover, preschool children already have linguistic knowledge that modal verbs license conjunctive inferences for sentences with disjunction.

摘要

有人提出，儿童与成人不同之处在于，儿童许可对不具有任何许可表达的析取句进行连词推断。该建议是，儿童从句子“ A或B”推断出“ A和B”。尽管在一些研究中已经报道了儿童对析取的合取解释，但在其他研究中却没有观察到它们。这项研究调查了不同发现的一种可能来源，即是否存在上下文引入的对象，而不是测试语句中提到的对象。使用“真值判断”任务，我们对学龄前讲普通话的儿童和一个成年人对照组进行了三个实验。实验1中的测试句子包括析取词和名词性情态动词，并且上下文仅包括测试语句中提到的对象。在实验2中，从测试语句中省略了语义模态动词。实验3的句子与实验2的句子相同，但是上下文中除了测试句子中提到的对象之外还包含其他对象。儿童和成人都为实验1中的测试句子分配了一个推断性推论。在实验2中，由于没有动词动词且没有上下文引入的宾语，有一部分儿童计算了推断性推论，而成年人则没有。在实验3中，两个小组都没有进行合取推断。研究结果表明，非语言环境中的实体会影响儿童对逻辑表达的理解。此外，