[lingtalks] TODAY: Stephen Crain 11/13 (Linguistics Colloquium)

[Klinton Bicknell]

Our upcoming linguistics colloquium will be Stephen Crain, presenting a talk
entitled "Why children are more logical than adults." Professor Crain is
coming to us from Macquarie University (in Sydney); he was formerly at the
University of Maryland.

For further information about the Linguistics department colloquia series,
including the schedule of future events, please visit
http://ling.ucsd.edu/events/colloquia.html .

:: Details ::

Monday 13 November
2-3:30pm
AP&M 4301

:: Abstract ::

Why children are more logical than adults
Stephen Crain, Macquarie University


Suppose you and a friend have just seen Max order some sushi and some pasta.

Later you overhear your friend tell someone "Max ordered sushi or pasta." 
Would you contradict your friend, saying "No, that's wrong, Max ordered
sushi 
and pasta."?  That's what adult speakers of English would do, but child 
speakers would not do this. For them, "Max ordered sushi or pasta" does 
correctly describe the case where Max ordered both. Textbooks of logic
specify 
that "A or B" includes the possibility of both A and B. So child speakers of

English appear to be more logical than adult speakers. As child speakers
grow 
up, their decisions change about when or is appropriate, because their 
interpretation of or clashes with how adult speakers use the term. But the 
difference in meaning between the "or" of formal logic and the "or" of
English 
emerges late in language development. So, it appears to be a universal
property 
of human languages that statements of the form "A or B" are interpreted as 
including the possibility of both A and B, just as in logic textbooks.

Now suppose that your sister Suzi didn't see Max order sushi, but she did
see 
him order pasta. Later you overhear your friend tell someone "Suzi didn't
see 
Max order sushi or pasta."  Would you contradict your friend, saying "No
that's 
wrong. Suzi did see Max order pasta."  That's what adult speakers of English

would do, and that's what child speakers would do. Textbooks of logic would 
agree. In logic, "not [A or B]" excludes the possibility of A and it
excludes 
the possibility of B. Moreover, if the English statement "Suzi didn't see
Max 
order sushi or pasta" is translated into Japanese, Russian, Hungarian, or
any 
other language, it means the same thing, that Suzi didn t see Max order
sushi 
and she didn t see him order pasta. So, it appears to be a universal
property 
of human languages that statements of the form "not [A or B]" are
interpreted 
as excluding the possibility of both A and B, just as in logic textbooks.

Observations like these, from research on child language and from 
cross-linguistic research, indicate that language and logic share some of
the 
same basic notions, including the meaning of disjunction (English "or", 
Japanese "ka", Chinese "huozhe", and so on). These observations are relevant

for the long-standing nature versus nurture controversy. Child and adult 
speakers have different ideas of what "or" means. This tells us that young 
children do not 'learn' what "or" means by watching how adults use "or". The

alternative is to suppose that children draw upon innate knowledge in
accessing 
the logical meaning of "or" in human languages. This conclusion is
reinforced 
by the observation that all languages adopt the logical meaning of "or" in 
certain linguistic environments. A linguistic property that (a) emerges in 
child language without decisive evidence from experience, and (b) is common
to 
all human languages, is a likely candidate for innate specification.
Experience 
matters, of course. As child speakers grow up, they must eventually learn to

use "or" in the same way as adults do. But, based on findings from child 
language and cross-linguistic research, it looks like certain aspects of 
language and logic are part of the human genome.