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

这一奖项的全部或部分资金来自《2021年美国救援计划法案》(公法117-2)。诸如“如果猪有翅膀，它们就会飞”或“我希望猪能飞”之类的用法，表达了一种可能性(会飞的猪)，这与我们所知的现实世界中的事实(猪没有翅膀)形成了鲜明对比。本论文研究的是儿童如何学会产生和理解这种“反事实”话语。要以成熟的方式使用反事实的表达，儿童需要发展复杂的推理和复杂的语言能力。这个项目旨在通过调查反事实表达的复杂性是否影响儿童开始使用反事实语言的年龄，并在推理需求相同的情况下理解反事实语言，来理清推理和语言发展的轨迹。这项研究将促进我们对反事实推理的典型发展的理解，这对于高级类型的批判性思维是必不可少的，例如对比可能性和评估过去的事件。本研究获得的知识和方法可以用来进一步开发诊断工具来识别患有发育迟缓的儿童，如自闭症谱系障碍儿童。更具体地说，本研究比较了表达反事实意义的结构(例如英语中的愿望)和不表达反事实意义的结构(例如英语中的IF/THEN-条件句)的习得轨迹，并考察了反事实中的过去时标记表达现在非现实而不是过去时间取向这一事实所带来的习得挑战。该项目包括对儿童自发反事实产生的跨语言(对比英语和普通话-汉语)语料库的研究，考察4岁和5岁儿童反事实理解的图片选择任务，以及调查2岁和3岁儿童对简单反事实话语的内隐理解的眼动跟踪研究。因此，这篇论文通过提出语言学习中形式到意义的映射问题来补充先前关于儿童反事实推理的研究，并介绍了适用于在繁重任务要求可能掩盖潜在能力的人群中调查反事实理解的方法。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.