Interpretation of disjunction in Turkish-speaking children

Date

2025-4

Author

Us, Enes

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This study aimed to investigate Turkish-speaking children’s interpretations of disjunction to test two competing accounts: the alternatives-based and ambiguity account. Using a Truth-Value Judgment Task, we examined Turkish-speaking children's interpretations of three disjunction markers (veya, ya da, and ya…ya…). Results from 58 children showed that children's interpretations were conjunctive only with simplex forms, supporting the ambiguity account. Moreover, even when the stronger alternative (i.e., and) was salient in one of the disjunction marker's morphological makeup (i.e, veya), no children computed exclusivity implicatures. These findings suggest that children’s non-adult-like interpretations might stem from the ambiguity of disjunction rather than a scalar implicature computation.

Subject Keywords

scalar implicatures, disjunction, alternatives, ambiguity

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/114462

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis