How do children reason about hypothetical possibilities? Evidence from language production

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Possibility reasoning is a crucial component of human thought and language but children’s ability to entertain and reflect on possibilities undergoes protracted development (Nyhout & Ganea, 2019). The reasons behind this protracted timeline are highly debated. An intriguing – yet underexplored – explanation is that the development of possibility reasoning relies on the acquisition of the language of possibility, which tends to be semantically and syntactically complex and acquired relatively late (Cournane, 2021; Grigoroglou & Ganea, 2022; Leahy & Carey, 2020). This symposium explores the relation between possibility reasoning and language by focusing on children’s production of hypotheticals, often expressed as conditional (if…then) constructions. Existing evidence of how children acquire conditionals is limited and comes primarily from naturalistic studies (Bowerman, 1986; Kuczaj & Daly, 1979). Here, we provide novel evidence about children’s expression of hypothetical thought, using a variety of methodologies, a wide age range, and systematic comparisons with adults. Paper 1 investigates how adults and 3- to 6-year-olds describe high/low-hypotheticality scenarios and finds that, unlike prior claims, conditionals are not produced later than other constructions of similar grammatical (but less conceptual) complexity. Paper 2 elicits hypothetical constructions in guided parent-child interactions and finds that children’s early hypotheticals arise in dialogue via a co-construction process. Paper 3 uses the CHILDES corpus to investigate 4-year-olds’ use of modal verbs in conditionals and finds that children, unlike adults in their input, overuse possibility modals, potentially because they cannot restrict the set of available possibilities. The relation of conceptual development and language is discussed throughout.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

• Myrto Grigoroglou, University of Toronto

Discussant

• Paul Harris, Harvard University

Individual Presentations

• Conceptual and psycholinguistic factors in the acquisition of conditionals - Presenting Author: Myrto Grigoroglou, University of Toronto; Patricia A Ganea, University of Toronto

• The Co-Construction of Counterfactual Worlds in Parent-Child Conversations - Presenting Author: Angela Nyhout, University of Kent; Emily Veall; Patricia A Ganea, University of Toronto

• Children’s overuse of possibility modals in counterfactual production - Presenting Author: Ioana Grosu, New York University; Ailís Cournane, New York University