Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-31T16:57:55.008Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Structure of child and adult past counterfactuals, and implications for acquisition of the construction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2012

ALISON CRUTCHLEY
ALISON CRUTCHLEY*
Affiliation:
University of Huddersfield
*
[*]Address for correspondence: e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Children start producing if p, q conditionals relatively late. Past counterfactuals (PCFs), for example ‘If she had shut the cage, the rabbit wouldn't have escaped’, are particularly problematic for children; despite evidence of comprehension in the preschool years, children aged eleven are still making production errors in PCF structure (Crutchley, 2004). Working within a usage-based framework, the present study explores whether PCFs in the conversational component of the British National Corpus show structural similarities to the set of PCF structures produced by six- to eleven-year-old children in an elicitation task. Adult PCFs are found to be both rare in spontaneous conversation and very varied in structure. Low token frequency and high type frequency are hypothesized to account partly for children's late acquisition of the PCF construction. However, regularities in the use of subjects and verbs in adult PCFs are hypothesized to assist children's acquisition of the construction.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , March 2013 , pp. 438 - 468
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Adams, C., Cooke, R., Crutchley, A., Hesketh, A. & Reeves, D. (2001). Assessment of comprehension and expression 6–11. Windsor: NFER-Nelson.Google Scholar
Athanasiadou, A. & Dirven, R. (1997). Conditionality, hypotheticality, counterfactuality. In Athanasiadou, A. and Dirven, R. (eds), On conditionals again, 61–96. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bamberg, M. G. W. (1987). The acquisition of narratives: Learning to use language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, E., Bretherton, I. & Snyder, L. (1988). From first words to grammar: Individual differences and dissociable mechanisms. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Beck, S. R., Riggs, K. J. & Gorniak, S. L. (2010). The effect of causal chain length on counterfactual conditional reasoning. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 28(3), 505–521 [doi: 10.1348/026151009X450836].CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Beck, S. R., Robinson, E. J., Carroll, D. J. & Apperley, I. A. (2006). Children's thinking about counterfactuals and future hypotheticals as possibilities. Child Development 77(2), 413–26 [doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00879.x].CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bowerman, M. (1986). First steps in acquiring conditionals. In Traugott, E., Ferguson, C. A., Snitzer Reilly, J. & ter Meulen, A. (eds), On conditionals, 285–307. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
British National Corpus (BNC), version 3 (BNC XML Edition) (2007). Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium [www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/].Google Scholar
Burnard, L. (ed.) (2000). The British National Corpus users reference guide. [Retrieved from www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/archive/worldURG/urg.pdf].Google Scholar
Bybee, J. & Thompson, S. A. (2000). Three frequency effects in syntax. In Moxley, J. & Juge, M. (eds), Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society, 378–88. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Byrne, R. M. (1997). Cognitive processes in counterfactual thinking about what might have been. Psychology of Learning and Motivation 31, 105–154 [doi:10.1016/S0079-7421(08)60501-0].CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cameron-Faulkner, T., Lieven, E. & Tomasello, M. (2003). A construction based analysis of child directed speech. Cognitive Science 27, 843–73 [doi:10.1207/s15516709cog2706_2].CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carrow-Woolfolk, A. (1985). The Test for the Auditory Comprehension of Language – Revised. Chicago, IL: Riverside Publishing.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. & Kelly, B. F. (2006). Constructions and acquisition. In Clark, E. V. & Kelly, B. F. (eds), Constructions in acquisition, 1–14. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.Google Scholar
Crutchley, A. (2004). ‘If she had of shutted the cage, the rabbit wouldn't escape’: Past counterfactuals elicited from 6- to 11-year-old children. First Language 24(2), 209–240 [doi:10.1177/0142723704044935].CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dancygier, B. (1998). Conditionals and prediction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dancygier, B. & Sweetser, E. (2005). Mental spaces in grammar: Conditional constructions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Declerck, R. & Reed, S. (2001). Conditionals: A comprehensive empirical analysis. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dunn, L. M., Dunn, L. M., Whetton, C. & Burley, J. (1997). British Picture Vocabulary Scale, 2nd edn.London: NFER Nelson.Google Scholar
Fillmore, C. J. (1988). The Mechanisms of ‘CG’. In Axmaker, S., Jaisser, A. & Singmaster, H. (eds), Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society, 35–55. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Fillmore, C. J. (1997a) Lecture 7: Conditional sentences. Lecture notes from Berkeley Construction Grammar website [www.icsi.berkeley.edu/∼kay/bcg/lec07.html; last updated 27 February 1997; accessed 5 February 2010].Google Scholar
Fillmore, C. J. (1997b) Lecture 2: Idiomaticity. Lecture notes from Berkeley Construction Grammar website [www.icsi.berkeley.edu/∼kay/bcg/lec02.html].Google Scholar
Francis, H. S., Gregory, M. L. & Michaelis, L. A. (1999). Are lexical subjects deviant? Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society 35, 85–97.Google Scholar
German, T. P. & Nichols, S. (2003). Children's counterfactual inferences about long and short causal chains. Developmental Science 6, 514–23 [doi:10.1111/1467-7687.00309].CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalisation in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Goldberg, A. E., Casenhiser, D. & Sethuraman, N. (2005). The role of prediction in construction-learning. Journal of Child Language 32, 407–426 [doi:10.1017/S0305000904006798].CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Guajardo, N. R. & Turley-Ames, K. J. (2004). Preschoolers' generation of different types of counterfactual statements and theory of mind understanding. Cognitive Development 19, 53–80 [doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2003.09.002].CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huttenlocher, J., Smiley, P. & Charney, R. (1983). Emergence of action categories in the child: Evidence from verb meanings. Psychological Review 90, 72–93 [doi:10.1037//0033-295X.90.1.72].CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1980). Psychological processes underlying pronominalization and non-pronominalization in children's connected discourse. In Kreiman, J. & Ojedo, E. (eds), Papers from the Parasession on Pronouns and Anaphora, 231–50. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1984). Children's problem solving. In Lamb, M. E., Brown, A. L. & Rogoff, B. (eds), Advances in developmental psychology, vol. III, 39–90. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Kay, P. & Fillmore, C. J. (1999). Grammatical constructions and linguistic generalizations: The What's X Doing Y? construction. Language 75(1), 1–33 [doi:10.2307/417472].CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krippendorff, K. (2004). Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology, 2nd edn.Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Krippendorff, K. (2007). Computing Krippendorff's alpha-reliability. [Retrieved from www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/krippendorff/dogs.html].Google Scholar
Kuczaj, S. A. & Daly, M. J. (1979). The development of hypothetical reference in the speech of young children. Journal of Child Language 6, 563–79.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Liles, B. Z. (1993). Narrative discourse in children with language disorders and children with normal language: A critical review of the literature. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 36, 868–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lombard, M., Snyder-Duch, J. & Bracken, C. C. (2002). Content analysis in mass communication: Assessment and reporting of intercoder reliability. Human Communication Research 28, 587–604 [doi:10.1093/hcr/28.4.587].CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mandler, J. M., & Johnson, N. S. (1977). Remembrance of things parsed: Story structure and recall. Cognitive Psychology 9, 111–51 [doi:10.1016/0010-0285(77)90006-8].CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perner, J., Sprung, M. & Steinkogler, B. (2004). Counterfactual conditionals and false belief: A developmental dissociation. Cognitive Development 19, 179–201 [doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2003.12.001].CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reilly, J. S. (1982). The acquisition of conditionals in English. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Reilly, J. S. (1983). What are conditionals for? Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 22, 124–32.Google Scholar
Reilly, J. S. (1986). The acquisition of temporals and conditionals. In Traugott, E., Ferguson, C. A., Snitzer Reilly, J. & ter Meulen, A. (eds), On conditionals, 309–331. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riggs, K. J., Peterson, D. M., Robinson, E. J. & Mitchell, P. (1998). Are errors in false belief tasks symptomatic of a broader difficulty with counterfactuality? Cognitive Development 13, 73–90 [doi:10.1016/S0885-2014(98)90021-1].CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, E. J. & Beck, S. (2001). What is difficult about counterfactual reasoning? In Riggs, K. J. & Mitchell, P. (eds), Children's reasoning and the mind, 101–120. Hove: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Sag, I. A. (to appear). Sign-based construction grammar: An informal synopsis. In Boas, H. and Sag, I. A. (eds), Sign-based construction grammar. Stanford: CSLI Publications [Retrieved from http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/papers/theo-syno.pdf].Google Scholar
Schachter, J. C. (1971). Presupposition and counterfactual conditional sentences. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Schönefeld, D. (2006). Constructions. Constructions Special Volume 1(1) [www.constructions-online.de/articles/specvol1/667].Google Scholar
Scott, M. (2004). WordSmith Tools v. 4.0. Oxford: Oxford University Press [Retrieved from www.lexically.net/wordsmith].Google Scholar
Stein, N. L. & Glenn, C. G. (1979). An analysis of story comprehension in elementary school children. In Freedle, R. O. (ed.), New directions in discourse processing, vol. 2, 53–120. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Thomson, A. J. & Martinet, A. V. (1986). A practical English grammar, 4th edn.Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (1992). First verbs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar