Children Cannot Differentiate 'Or" From 'And'

If you are a parent and often had to argue with your child who cannot seem to understand the difference between "or" and "and," know that you are not alone. Scientists discovered that children are rarely just testing your limits when they confuse your "or" and "and." Instead, their linguistic comprehension just does not afford them this kind of understanding, as backed by scientific data.

According to a new study, children have a difficulty interpreting disjunction like conjunction. When parents want to restrict their child to only one food or one activity by using the word "or," scientists found that the child often perceives this as an invitation to do both because it did not register to them that their parents only wanted to choose either one of the choices.

The lead researchers, who are MIT linguistic professors plus a team from Carleton University gathered data from 59 children three  to six years old, who are English-speaking. They also gathered data from 26 adults in the Ottawa area to determine how children's comprehension differs from that of adults. 

Results revealed that apparently, the word "or" is not different from "and" when it comes to the kids. "They [children] don't use 'cake and ice cream' as an alternative," MIT Linguistics Professor Danny Fox says. "As a result, 'cake or ice cream' is expected, if we are right about the nature of the computation, to become 'cake and ice cream' for the children."

Fox added further that across languages and for both children and adults, the words "or" and "and" can really be easily confused. "The remarkable logical fact is that when you take 'and' out of the space of alternatives, 'or,' becomes 'and.' This, of course, relies on the nature of the computation that we've postulated, and, hence, the results of the study provide confirmation of a form that I find rather exciting."

Of course, not understanding the difference between "or" and "and" does not mean the child cannot learn how to chooe from one option to the other anymore. Parents still need to make their children understand, lest they be accussed of free-range parenting (anything goes parenting), and suffer the consequences, as detailed by Huffington Post.