2018 Sat Session B 1130
Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Session B, Conference Auditorium | 11:30am
If they had been more transparent, the child would have discovered them more easily: How counterfactuals develop
L. Rouvoli, V. Tsakali, N. Kazanina
The study investigates how children learn the meaning of sentences with past Counterfactual conditionals like (1). Preschool children make reality mistakes on Counterfactuals, namely, they interpret them as denoting what has actually happened rather than what could have happened.1-6 Such mistakes were attributed to children’s conceptual limitations, e.g., deficit in executive functioning (considered to underpin many cognitive processes, including theory-of-mind1 and/or counterfactual reasoning4). What has escaped attention so far is the role of the linguistic form of Counterfactuals. Yet, learning which linguistic forms encode counterfactuality is far from trivial. A child acquiring English, for example, needs to discover that the specific combination If+PastPerfectVerb does not refer to an actual past event but rather indicates counterfactuality, i.e., denotes the opposite of what happened in reality. E.g., (1) means that she didn’t eat the peach and didn’t win the medal, despite it lacking any negation element. Counterfactuals (1) thus contrast with Simple Conditionals (2) which also convey an if-p-then-q relation but in a straightforward, transparent way.
- Past counterfactual conditionals: If she had eaten a peach, she would have won the
- Simple (future) conditionals: If the animal eats a peach/jelly, they will get a medal/cross.
Claim: We argue that learning that a grammatical construction is counterfactual and has ‘hidden negation’ is separate from the ability to reason counterfactually, and critical for developing counterfactual language.
Methodology: We tested 3-6 year-olds’ understanding of Counterfactuals (1). Correct understanding of Simple Conditionals (2) was a required prerequisite; we also used the Sally-Ann task7 to test children’s ability to represent counterfactual/false beliefs. If counterfactuals are problematic even for children who succeed on conditional reasoning and false/counterfactual beliefs, this indicates that they have not yet discovered that IF+PastPerfect designates counterfactuality.
The child and a puppet watched videos of a Food contest. In each of 8 videos, two animals of the same gender (e.g., Mrs.Cat & Mrs.Bear) could eat one of two foods and were judged according to the rules in Fig.1.The contest ended with the judge awarding prizes (Fig.2). After the video ended, the puppet explained to the child what happened using Counterfactuals like (1). The child had to choose which of the animals the puppet referred to. Children who mastered Counterfactuals would choose the animal who didn’t eat the peach/didn’t receive the medal (Mrs.Cat). The opposite choice (Mrs.Bear) would indicate a reality mistake.
Findings: results to-date (Table 1) show that 11/54 children (all aged 3.5-4.5 years) made reality mistakes on 7+/8 Counterfactuals trials despite having succeeded on Simple Conditionals. [42/54 children gave 7+/8 correct responses and only 1/54 children showed a ‘midway’ pattern, suggesting an all-or-nothing character of counterfactual acquisition.] All but two youngest of the 11 children who failed on Counterfactuals could represent false beliefs. [Pilot data from Greek children confirm this pattern.] Hence, the process of discovering linguistic form-to-meaning mapping for Counterfactuals is separable from the ability to reason counterfactually; we discuss its bottlenecks (the need to decode ‘fake’ PastPerfect tense morphology) and trajectory amidst the child’s general cognitive development.