Korean English Learners’ Comprehension of the Semantics of Disjunction

Abstract

While adult native English speakers have been known to interpret the disjunction ‘or’ exclusively, previous studies report that L1 children interpret ‘or’ inclusively and conjunctively. This points to the difference between adults and children in computing scalar implicature (SI, Singh et al. 2016, among others). Building on the L1 finding, we examined how advanced L2 learners of English interpret ‘or’ among the three possible readings: inclusive ((A∨B)∨(A∧B)), conjunctive (A∧B), and exclusive ((A∨B)∧¬(A∧B)). Two forms of disjunction were used following Tieu et al. (2017): simple (e.g., ‘A or B’) and complex (e.g., ‘either A or B’). The experimental results of the native English speakers were consistent with the previous report on L1 adults’ exclusive processing of the disjunction ‘or,’ regardless of the form it is presented with. Dissimilarly, although the L2 learners mostly interpreted both forms exclusively (similar to L1 adults), a significant portion of them registered the inclusive reading (similar to L1 children) more so for the simple form compared to the complex one, additionally suggesting a difference in the degree of strength of scalar implicature computed in the processing between the two types. Sharing the facets of both L1 adults and L1 children, this paper discusses the peculiar processing of the English disjunction ‘or’ by L2 learners.