Preschoolers’ interpretation of habitual and deontic conditionals: a delayed mapping between concept and language

Abstract

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.