Children’s interpretation of disjunction in negative sentences: A comparison of Turkish and German

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the interpretation of disjunction words (English or) in negative sentences by Turkish- and German-speaking children. Both children and adults were asked to judge Turkish/German sentences corresponding to the English sentence “This animal did not eat the carrot or the pepper.” Children acquiring both languages consistently assigned the same interpretation, which can be paraphrased as “This animal did not eat either the carrot or the pepper.” German-speaking adults also consistently assigned this interpretation, whereas Turkish-speaking adults assigned a different interpretation, which can be paraphrased as “It is the carrot or the pepper that this animal did not eat.” The finding that children initially assign the same interpretation across languages, despite difference in the interpretations assigned by adults, is credited to a “subset” principle of language learnability.

Acknowledgments

We thank undergraduate students at Boğaziçi University, Kırklareli University, and University of Potsdam for taking part in the experiments. We thank the staff of the kindergarten classes and the administration at Ramazan Yaman İlköǧretim Okulu and especially Tahsin-Mefküre Geçkin, Damla Berktaş, and Aydan Özel for help in recruiting child participants in Turkey and Prof. Barbara Hoehle, Tom Fritzche, Maike Riegel, and Vanessa Loeffler for help in child participant recruitment and testing in Germany. We also thank Dr. Peng Zhou for statistical guidance.

Funding

This study was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders (CE110001021) and by the German DAAD funding.

Notes

¹ Logically speaking, the sentences with disjunction that were categorized by Morris as instances of exclusive-or are consistent with both exclusive-or and inclusive-or. Both exclusive-or and inclusive-or make sentences true if only one of the disjuncts is true. These sentences were (incorrectly) counted by Morris as evidence in support of the conclusion that the input from adults is largely exclusive-or.

² Turkish uses a number of words such as (ya)…ya da, veya as the morphological realization for the disjunction operator or (Göksel & Kerslake 2005). See Geçkin, Crain & Thornton (2016) for evidence of Turkish-speaking children’s interpretation of negated disjunction phrases both with and without accusative case. For the purposes of this article, it is sufficient to note that in Turkish accusative case is associated with specificity. This is why the gloss for (7) in English is worded as ‘a certain carrot or a certain pepper.’

³ DIM refers to the diminutive suffix.

⁴ The reading on which both disjuncts are false is not readily accessed by adult Turkish speakers, due to a scalar implicature of “exclusivity.” A speaker of (7) who was in a position to know that both disjuncts were false would have used the corresponding sentence with conjunction.

⁵ We also tested a group of 18 adult Turkish speakers on the affirmative test sentence Bu hayvancık ya havucu ya da biberi yedi (‘This animal ate a certain carrot or a certain pepper’). None of the participants rejected this test sentence in the silver medal condition.

⁶ One would expect disjunction phrases with accusative case marking to take scope over negation if children and adults analyze the test sentences in the same way. A reviewer suggests that children’s assignment of the NOT > ACC interpretation of the test sentences may have been due to children’s insensitivity to the accusative case marker. While this possibility cannot be ruled out, it should be noted that the findings of the present study are consistent with studies of children acquiring both case-marking languages (Japanese) and languages without case marking (Mandarin Chinese).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders (CE110001021) and by the German DAAD funding.