Doctoral Dissertation Research: Child Production and Comprehension of Counterfactual Wishes and Conditionals

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). Utterances such as "If pigs had wings, they could fly" or "I wish pigs could fly", express a possibility (flying pigs) that is in contrast with what we know to be true in the actual world (pigs don't have wings). This dissertation project investigates how children learn to produce and understand such 'counterfactual' utterances. To use counterfactual expressions in a mature manner, children need to develop both complex reasoning and complex language abilities. This project aims to disentangle the trajectories of reasoning and language development by investigating whether complexity of the counterfactual expression affects the age at which children start using and understanding counterfactual language when reasoning demands are the same. The proposed research will advance our understanding of the typical development of counterfactual reasoning, which is essential for advanced types of critical thinking such as contrasting possibilities and evaluating past events. The knowledge and methodologies obtained from this research can be used to further develop diagnostic tools to identify children with developmental delays, like autism-spectrum-disorder. More specifically, this dissertation research compares the acquisition trajectory of constructions dedicated to express counterfactual meaning (e.g. wishes in English) against constructions that are not (e.g. if/then-conditionals in English), and investigates the acquisition challenge posed by the fact that the past tense marker in counterfactuals expresses present non-actuality rather than past temporal orientation. This project consists of cross-linguistic (comparing English and Mandarin-Chinese) corpus research on children's spontaneous counterfactual productions, a picture-selection task to investigate counterfactual comprehension in 4- and 5-year-olds, and an eye tracking study to investigate 2- and 3-year-olds' implicit comprehension of simple counterfactual utterances. This dissertation thus complements prior research on children's counterfactual reasoning by raising the issue of form-to-meaning mapping in language learning and introduces methodology suitable to investigate counterfactual comprehension in populations where heavy task demands may mask underlying abilities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.