Coralie Chevallier, Ira Noveck, Lewis Bott, Valentina Lanzetti, Tatiana Nazir, Dan Sperber (2008) Making disjunctions exclusive. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 61(11), 1741-1760.

Abstract: This work examines how people interpret the sentential connective “or”, which can be viewed either inclusively (A or B or both) or exclusively (A or B but not both). Drawing on prior work concerning quantifiers (Noveck, 2001; Noveck & Posada, 2003; Bott & Noveck, 2004) and following a relevance-theoretic line of argument, we hypothesized that conditions encouraging more processing effort would give rise to more pragmatic inferences and hence to more exclusive interpretations of the disjunction. This prediction was confirmed in three experiments.