Learning Imprecision – evidence of an innately logical brain?

The Barner paper discusses the implications of scalars on the generation of implicatures. Notably, it argues that children's inability to generate alternate scalars in interpreting a sentence – such as "I ate some of the cake" – can explain failure in generating implications – in this example, that the speaker did not eat all the cake.

One note that stood out to me in the reading was the fact that children would would interpret "or" inclusively, rather than exclusively. This is interesting, because that is the same way "or" operates in a strict logical or mathematical sense. This seems counter-intuitive, since often this use of "or" is what confuses students first learning mathematical logic; we think of "or" as exclusive.

Why then do children use it inclusively? We can turn also to the "some"/"all" examples to see that children apparently interpret phrases more literally than adults, who interpret them pragmatically. While this most certainly is a sign that children lack the life experience that informs how adults use language, from which they maybe infer, in a probabilistic sense, imprecise implicatures, generated from the fact that we use language the way we do, rather than what language may itself mean.

If this is the case, it is possible – if not entirely likely – that children have a innately logical brain.