Myrto Grigoroglou, Patricia Ganea University of Toronto
Conditionals have multiple meanings: the statement “If Jill goes out without an umbrella, she will get wet” is true when Jill goes out without an umbrella and gets wet (conjunction), when she goes out with an umbrella and does not get wet (biconditional) and when she goes out with an umbrella and (still) gets wet (conditional). Developmental research shows difficulties in understanding conditionals (often persisting into adulthood), but the nature of this difficulty remains unclear. Some argue that children have problems representing multiple possibilities, due to limited cognitive resources (Markovits & Barrouillet, 2002). Others suggest that children have difficulties deriving some interpretations due to task-related factors (Rumain et al., 1983). Here, we use a new, less complex paradigm that allows us to examine children’s conditional interpretations at a much younger age. Eighty 3-6-year-olds and twenty adults were asked to match an if-then statement with one of two pictures: one depicting a scenario where the conditional is false vs. one of the three scenarios where the conditional is true. Unlike prior research, adults were successful with all three interpretations. Children had a conjunctive interpretation since age 3 but the development of the other two interpretations was particularly protracted. Interestingly, children were more successful in the conditional than the biconditional interpretation, perhaps due to alternative reasoning strategies in the forced-choice task. Preliminary results from follow-up experiments suggest that the other two interpretations are acquired by age 10, earlier than previously thought. Our findings suggest that children’s difficulties with conditionals are task-dependent.
