A nonce investigation of a possible conjunctive default for disjunction

Abstract

Our study explores whether there is a conjunctive default in the interpretation of disjunction, focusing on Romanian children’s and adults’ understanding of nonce functional words. We investigate how participants interpret novel connectors such as mo and mo...mo, which could theoretically correspond to ‘(both) A and B’, ‘(either) A or B’, or ‘A not B’ / ‘neither A nor B’. Our results reveal that both adults and children overwhelmingly assign a conjunctive meaning to these nonce words. This suggests the existence of a conjunctive default in interpreting unknown operators linking two elements, which could explain why children have sometimes been found to interpret disjunctions as conjunctions in previous studies (Singh et al. 2016, Tieu et al. 2017, Bleotu et al. 2023). In particular, we discuss how this conjunctive default may influence Romanian children’s interpretation of complex disjunctions such as fie...fie, potentially explaining why they treat these constructions conjunctively. Importantly,
our findings also raise broader questions about why certain logical interpretations are favored over others, and whether frequency or cognitive simplicity can drive such biases.