Bengali-speaking children’s comprehension of disjunction

Abstract

Children struggle to comprehend that a disjunctive sentence of the form ‘Mary saw John or Peter’ gives rise to a scalar implicature (SI) that negates its stronger alternative form ‘Mary saw John and Peter’. Children’s SI comprehension has been studied across various languages, with many studies arguing that their apparent failure is due to their problem accessing the scalar alternative. However, no study seems to have yet tested children’s disjunction interpretation by making the alternative available to them. The present study tested whether children will derive implicature if the relevant alternative is available to them in the immediate context. The study examines Bengali-speaking children from an underdeveloped region, whose language presents a unique case for the acquisition of disjunction. In Bengali, the simple disjunction word is morphologically complex, consisting of the morphemes ‘if’ and ‘not’. This compositional structure provides a novel perspective on how children interpret disjunction cross-linguistically. The results reveal a developmental pattern in children’s SI derivation, extending previous findings to a new linguistic context.