Morphological access to alternatives fails to boost scalar implicatures: interpretation of disjunction in Turkish-speaking children

Sentences involving disjunction, such as “The girl likes pizza or pasta” often give rise to the inference that she does not like both. However, several studies report that children tend to interpret the sentence inclusively (i.e. she likes pizza or pasta, or possibly both) or conjunctively (i.e. she likes both). The alternatives-only account attributes this to children’s difficulty accessing stronger lexical alternatives, while the ambiguity account proposes that disjunction is ambiguous for children between an inclusive and a conjunctive interpretation. In this study, we tested these competing predictions using a Truth-Value Judgment Task with Turkish-speaking children, drawing on the unique morphology of Turkish disjunction markers, one of which contains the stronger alternative. Overall, children interpreted disjunctions inclusively or conjunctively, but not exclusively, even when a disjunction marker could facilitate access to a stronger alternative. These findings are difficult to reconcile with the alternatives-only account and are more consistent with the ambiguity account, suggesting that access to a stronger alternative alone is not sufficient for achieving adult-like interpretations.