Abstract
When “or” is uttered in a sentence, in principle the readings “A or B, but not both” (exclusive) and “A or B and possibly both” (inclusive) are possible. Acquisition literature has detected an asymmetry in children's behavior. On the one hand, children up to 4;6 years old, unlike adults, accept the equivalent of “or” in contexts in which “and” would be more pragmatically appropriate to describe the situation. On the other hand, the results of production studies carried out with children acquiring English indicate that they produce “exclusive-or” before the age of four. Our work argues that Optimality Theory (OT) can explain this asymmetry in child language, in which production occurs before comprehension. Focusing on Brazilian Portuguese (BP), children's linguistic behavior in the production of “ou” was investigated. Two corpora of children's speech were analyzed: one with 119 hours of spontaneous recordings involving four children between 2;0 and 5;6 years of age, and another with 51 hours of recordings involving seven children between 4;3 and 9;0 years of age. The results corroborate the findings for English, with the first production of “exclusive or” observed at 2;4 years old. To account for the results, an OT-based analysis, extending Mognon et al. (2021)’s analysis for “some” to “ou”, is proposed. We assume that unidirectional optimization is unable to select a winning output and, for implicature calculation, it is necessary for bidirectional optimization to come into play. From this analysis, it will be argued that bidirectional optimization is acquired late in child development, which may explain the findings in the literature that point to the asymmetry between production and comprehension.
Keywords:
language acquisition; pragmatics; scalar implicatures; optimality theory; bidirectional optimality theory