We present evidence that preschool children oftentimes understand disjunctive sentences as if they were conjunctive. The result holds for matrix disjunctions as well as disjunctions embedded under every. At the same time, there is evidence in the literature that children understand or as inclusive disjunction in downward-entailing contexts. We propose to explain this seemingly conflicting pattern of results by assuming that the child knows the inclusive disjunction semantics of or, and that the conjunctive inference is a scalar implicature. We make two assumptions about implicature computation in the child: (i) that children access only a proper subset of the adult alternatives (specifically, they do not access the lexicon when generating alternatives), and (ii) that children possess the adult capacity to strengthen sentences with implicatures. As a consequence, children are expected to sometimes not compute any implicatures at all, but in other cases they are expected to compute an implicature that is different from the adult implicature. We argue that the child’s conjunctive strengthening of disjunctive sentences realizes the latter possibility: the adult infers that the conjunction is false but the child infers that the conjunction is true. This behaviour is predicted when our assumptions about child development are coupled with the assumption that a covert exhaustive operator is responsible for strengthening in both the child and the adult. Specifically, children’s conjunctive strengthening is predicted to follow from the same mechanism used by adults to compute conjunctive free choice implicatures in response to disjunctive permission sentences (recursive exhaustification). We furthermore argue that this parallel between the child and the adult extends to disambiguation preferences. In particular, we present evidence that children prefer to strengthen disjunctions to conjunctions, in matrix and embedded positions (under every); this result mirrors previous findings that adults prefer to compute free choice, at the root and under every. We propose a disambiguation strategy that explains the preference for conjunctive strengthening – by both the child and the adult – even though there is no general preference for exhaustification. Specifically, we propose that the preference for a conjunctive strengthening follows from a pragmatic preference for a complete answer to the Question Under Discussion.

中文翻译：

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儿童将析取视作连词：内隐和儿童发展理论的后果

我们提供的证据表明，学龄前儿童经常理解析取句，就好像它们是析取句一样。结果适用于矩阵析取以及每个元素下嵌入的析取。同时，在文献中有证据表明，儿童在向下的情境中理解或包容性分离。我们建议通过假设孩子知道或的包容性分离语义来解释这种看似矛盾的结果模式。，并且合取推断是标量含义。我们对孩子的隐式计算做出两个假设：（i）孩子仅访问成人选择项的适当子集（特别是，他们在生成替换项时不访问词典），以及（ii）孩子拥有成人的能力加强含蓄的句子。结果，有时期望儿童根本不计算任何暗示，但在其他情况下，期望他们计算与成人暗示不同的暗示。我们认为，孩子对析取句的连词强化可以实现后者的可能性：成年人推断出连词是错误的，而孩子则推断出连词是正确的。这种行为是可以预测的当我们对儿童发育的假设与秘密的穷举性操作者负责增强儿童和成人的假设相结合时。具体而言，预计儿童的结语强化将遵循成年人使用的相同机制，以计算对析取许可语句（递归穷竭）的结语自由选择含意。我们进一步认为，儿童和成人之间的这种相似性延伸到消歧偏好。尤其是，我们提供的证据表明，孩子更喜欢在矩阵和嵌入位置（在每个下）加强与连词的分离。这个结果反映了以前的发现，即成年人更喜欢在根源上和每个根源下自由选择。。我们提出了一种消除歧义的策略，该策略说明了儿童和成人均倾向于综合性锻炼的倾向，尽管对于精疲力竭没有普遍的偏好。具体而言，我们建议偏向于联合加强，是出于对正在讨论的问题的完整答案的务实偏向。