Children’s Interpretation of Conditional Connectives

Ozge D., Aktepe S. C., Gül S.

LANGUAGES, cilt.9, sa.12, ss.2-17, 2024 (ESCI)

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 9 Sayı: 12
  • Basım Tarihi: 2024
  • Doi Numarası: 10.3390/languages9120365
  • Dergi Adı: LANGUAGES
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Scopus, Linguistic Bibliography, Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts, Directory of Open Access Journals
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.2-17
  • Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Previous studies have shown that the uni-conditional marker if can be interpreted bicon-
ditionally in some contexts. Similarly, the biconditional marker unless may receive a biconditional
interpretation in positive quantificational contexts (e.g., every) and a uni-conditional reading in negative
quantificational contexts (e.g., no). However, exceptive accounts expect unless to yield a biconditional
meaning in all contexts. Our aim in this preliminary study is to provide experimental evidence about
how children interpret these conditional connectives. A recent study conducted with adult Turkish
speakers found that unless was not semantically biconditional in either positive quantificational con-
texts or negative quantificational contexts (Evcen et al. 2019). We used a similar paradigm with a
child-friendly adaptation to test how if (-sA), if not (de˘gilse), and unless (-mAdIkçA) would behave with
5-year-old children acquiring Turkish. Our preliminary results indicate that children, unlike adults,
disregard the antecedent hosting the conditional connective but focus only on the consequent hosting
the quantifier structure. We argue this may be related to the higher syntactic and semantic complexity in
these structures incurring heavy working memory demands.