Preschoolers’ interpretation of habitual and deontic conditionals: a delayed mapping between concept and language
By investigating Dutch children’s interpretation habitual and deontic conditionals, this paper explores their mapping of the concepts of hypotheticality and conditionality into a corresponding linguistic form of IF-conditionals. Results of 46 children (20 girls; age range = 3;11-6;00; mean = 4;11) in a truth value judgment task with three types of stimuli, i.e. habitual conditionals, deontic conditionals, and conjunctive/additive constructions, show the following. First, the preschoolers do not exhibit different interpretation performances with the two types of conditional stimuli and the conj... Mehr ...
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Dokumenttyp: | Artikel |
Erscheinungsdatum: | 2020 |
Reihe/Periodikum: | Journal of Child Language Acquisition and Development (2020) |
Verlag/Hrsg.: |
Science-res Publishing
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Schlagwörter: | Conditional constructions / conditionality / Dutch / hypotheticality / truth value judgment task / Special aspects of education / LC8-6691 / Language acquisition / P118-118.7 |
Sprache: | Englisch |
Permalink: | https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-26630254 |
Datenquelle: | BASE; Originalkatalog |
Powered By: | BASE |
Link(s) : | https://doaj.org/article/da2dd1695d9a425794ebc7f4fed582cd |
By investigating Dutch children’s interpretation habitual and deontic conditionals, this paper explores their mapping of the concepts of hypotheticality and conditionality into a corresponding linguistic form of IF-conditionals. Results of 46 children (20 girls; age range = 3;11-6;00; mean = 4;11) in a truth value judgment task with three types of stimuli, i.e. habitual conditionals, deontic conditionals, and conjunctive/additive constructions, show the following. First, the preschoolers do not exhibit different interpretation performances with the two types of conditional stimuli and the conjunctive/additive type. Second, the preschoolers show more target-like interpretation performances with deontic conditionals than habitual conditionals when it comes to the concept of conditionality. These results suggest a delayed mapping of the two concepts investigated into the corresponding linguistic construction. In other words, the syntactic construction of IF-conditional in Dutch is first acquired before the two concepts are assigned to it. Taking into consideration different factors, this paper discusses possible explanations for the delay.