What are the constraints, cues, and mechanisms that help learners create successful word-meaning mappings? This study takes up linguistic disjunction and looks at cues and mechanisms that can help children learn the meaning of or. We first used a large corpus of parent-child interactions to collect statistics on or uses. Children started producing or between 18-30 months and by 42 months, their rate of production reached a plateau. Second, we annotated for the interpretation of disjunction in child-directed speech. Parents used or mostly as exclusive disjunction, typically accompanied by rise-fall intonation and logically inconsistent disjuncts. But when these two cues were absent, disjunction was generally not exclusive. Our computational modeling suggests that an ideal learner could successfully interpret an English disjunction (as exclusive or not) by mapping forms to meanings after partitioning the input according to the intonational and logical cues available in child-directed speech.

帮助学习者创建成功的词义映射的约束、线索和机制是什么？这项研究以语言析取为主题，探讨可以帮助儿童学习“或”含义的线索和机制。我们首先使用大量的亲子互动语料库来收集统计数据或使用情况。儿童在 18-30 个月期间开始生产，到 42 个月时，他们的生产速度达到稳定水平。其次，我们对针对儿童的言语中析取的解释进行了注释。父母使用或主要用作排他性析取词，通常伴随着升降调和逻辑上不一致的析取词。但当这两个线索不存在时，析取通常不是排他性的。我们的计算模型表明，理想的学习者可以在根据儿童导向语音中可用的语调和逻辑线索对输入进行分区后，通过将形式映射到含义来成功解释英语析取（排他或非排他）。