On the role of alternatives in the acquisition of simple and complex disjunctions in French and Japanese

When interpreting disjunctive sentences of the form'A or B', young children have been reported to differ fromadults in twoways. First, children have been reported to interpret disjunction inclusively rather than exclusively, accepting 'A or B' in contexts in which both A and B are true (Chierchia et al. 2001; Gualmini et al. 2001). Second, some children have been reported to interpret disjunction conjunctively, rejecting 'A or B' in contexts in which only one of the disjuncts is true (Paris 1973; Braine & Rumain 1981; Chierchia et al. 2004; Singh et al. 2015). In this article, weextend the investigation of children's interpretation of disjunction to include both simple and complex forms of disjunction, in two typologically unrelated languages: French and Japanese. First, given that complex disjunctions have been argued to give rise to obligatory exclusivity inferences (Spector 2014), we investigated whether the obligatoriness of the inference.