Stephen Crain, Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science
Much recent research in child and adult language has emphasized differences between classical logic and natural language. Although there are some clear differences between the logical connectives and quantificational devices of classical logic and the corresponding expressions of natural languages, there are reasons to suppose that logic and language share the same basic resources. One source of evidence is from child language. For example, Japanese-speaking children and Chinese-speaking children initially interpret the words expressing disjunction and conjunction as in classical logic, despite the absence of these interpretations for adult speakers. The second source of evidence is that both child and adult speakers of English, Japanese, and Chinese interpret the words for disjunction and conjunction in compliance with classical logic in sentences that contain the focus operator only (Japanese dake; Chinese zhi-you). The findings of cross-linguistic investigations of children and adults will be presented to substantiate the claims that (a) natural language and logic are more in alignment that has been recognized and that (b) children's language understanding is consistent with the continuity hypothesis - the proposal that child language can differ from the local language only in ways that adult languages can differ from each other. We will also discuss issues in research methodology.
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