Is DP conjunction always complex? The view from child Georgian and Hungarian

Mitrović & Sauerland (2014, 2016) claim that, across languages, DP-conjunction decomposes into [_JP[_MuP[DP₁ ⟳] MU] [_J’ J [_MuP [DP₂ ⟳] MU]]]. Their account, when combined with the independently motivated assumption that children better comprehend utterances which display a greater degree of 1-to-1 mapping between form and meaning (van Hout 2008, Guasti, Alexiadou & Sauerland 2023, a.o.), predicts that sentences where only J or MU are pronounced should be harder to comprehend relative to sentences where both J and MU are realized. We conducted an experiment testing this prediction by investigating children’s comprehension of conjunctive expressions in Georgian and Hungarian. While, for Hungarian, we did not find any differences between the types of conjunctive expressions, for Georgian, we found evidence that J-MU expressions were harder for children to comprehend than J or MU expressions. Our results challenge the account by Mitrović & Sauerland (2014, 2016) and cannot be captured by other existing accounts of conjunctive expressions either (Szabolcsi 2015, Haslinger et al. 2019).