Disjunction across polarities: Scope versus strengthening in children's interpretations of negative disjunctive sentences

This study investigates the sources of the possible interpretations of negative disjunctive statements (e.g. Girafa nu a cules ghiocelul sau trandafirul ‘The giraffe did not pick the snowdrop or the rose’) in Romanian children and adults. Previous research highlights cross-linguistic variation among adults: English-speaking adults allow both neither nor and not both interpretations, while Japanese-speaking adults only allow the not both interpretation. In contrast, children across a number of languages have been shown to prefer the stronger neither nor interpretation. We attempt to connect this area of research with studies showing that children interpret positive disjunctive statements (e.g. Girafa a cules ghiocelul sau trandafirul ‘The giraffe picked the snowdrop or the rose’) in an inclusive or conjunctive manner (and in particular with studies that argue that the conjunctive interpretation is the result of scalar strengthening). If the source of strong meanings across polarities is strengthening, then we expect the same children who prefer neither nor interpretations of negative disjunctive statements to be the same children who prefer conjunctive interpretations of positive disjunctive statements. We conducted a Truth Value Judgment Task (TVJT) with Romanian 5-year-old children and a group of adult controls to examine their behavior in negative and positive disjunctive statements and to investigate a possible positive correlation between strong interpretations across sentence polarities. Our results indicate that both groups behaved relatively similarly: in negative contexts, they pre-dominantly favored the neither nor interpretation, while in positive contexts, they predominantly favored an inclusive interpretation. These results do not support a positive correlation between strong interpretations of positive and negative disjunctive statements. Instead, we argue that strong interpretations may have different sources in sentences of differing polarity, namely, strengthening in positive statements and scope in negative ones.