As complex as they appear: Childrens comprehension of conjunctive expressions in Georgian

Abstract

Mitrovic and Sauerland [2014, 2016] claim that, across languages, DP-conjunction de composes into [JP [MuP [XP1 ] mu] [J j [MuP [XP2 ] mu]]]. The j-particle which occurs between conjuncts maps to set intersection, while the mu-particles map to the subset oper ator. Given that expressions which involve non-pronounced elements should be harder for children to comprehend than expressions which do not have such silent elements [Slobin, 1985, van Hout, 2008, Sauerland and Alexiadou, 2020, Guasti et al., 2022, a.o.], the account by Mitrovic and Sauerland [2014, 2016] predicts that sentences where either j or mu are pronounced should be harder to comprehend relative to sentences where both j and mu are realized. We conduct an experiment testing this prediction by investigating childrens comprehension of conjunctive expressions in Georgian. Our results constitute a challenge for the account by Mitrovic and Sauerland [2014, 2016] and other existing accounts of conjunctive expressions [Brasoveanu and Szabolcsi, 2013, Szabolcsi, 2015, a.o.]