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This article talks about a study that was conducted by MIT linguistics professors and a group from Carleton University that explored the phenomenon of why children mix up the words "and" and "or." Linguists say that children use almost entirely the same approach as adults when it comes to evaluating potentially ambiguous sentences, by testing and "strengthening" them into sentences with more precise meanings, when disjunction and conjunction ("or" and "and") are involved. However, they found that children do not test how a sentence would change if "and" was directly substituted for "or." On the other hand, adults compute "scalar implicatures," which is a technical phrase for thinking about the implications of the logical relationship between a sentence and its alternative. The research team conducted the study's experiment by testing 59 English-speaking children and 26 adults. The children ranged in age from 4 months to 6 years. The linguists gave the subjects a series of statements along with pictures, and asked them to say whether the statements were true or false. The results suggest that children are computing scalar implicatures when they evaluate the statements, but they largely do not substitute disjunctions and conjunctions when testing out the possible meaning of sentences, as adults do. In general, the researchers observed, across languages, and for children and adults alike, when you take 'and' out of the space of alternatives, "or" becomes "and."