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

该奖项全部或部分由2021年美国救援计划法案（公法117-2）资助。诸如“如果猪有翅膀，它们就能飞”或“我希望猪能飞”之类的话语表达了一种可能性（飞猪），与我们所知道的现实世界（猪没有翅膀）形成对比。本论文研究儿童如何学习产生和理解这种“反事实”的话语。为了以成熟的方式使用反事实表达，儿童需要发展复杂的推理和复杂的语言能力。本项目旨在通过调查当推理需求相同时，反事实表达的复杂性是否会影响儿童开始使用和理解反事实语言的年龄，来理清推理和语言发展的轨迹。拟议的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（如对比可能性和评估过去的事件）至关重要。本研究所获得的知识和方法可用于进一步开发诊断工具，以识别自闭症谱系障碍等发育迟缓儿童。更具体地说，本论文的研究比较了专门用于表达反事实意义的构式的习得轨迹（例如英语中的wishes）反对不（如英语中的if/then-条件句），并探讨了反事实句中的过去时标记表达的是现在的非现实性而不是过去的时间取向这一事实所带来的习得挑战。本研究包括儿童自发性反事实产出的跨语言语料库研究、4- 5岁儿童反事实理解的图片选择任务研究和2- 3岁儿童对简单反事实话语的内隐理解的眼动研究。因此，本论文通过提出形式到形式的问题，补充了先前关于儿童反事实推理的研究。语言学习中的意义映射，并介绍了适合于调查人群中的反事实理解的方法，在这些人群中，繁重的任务要求可能掩盖潜在的能力。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查进行评估来支持的搜索.

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.