Children's comprehension of pragmatic concepts expressed in ‘because’, ‘although’, ‘if’ and ‘unless’

Abstract

ABSTRACTFirst, third, and fifth graders judged a speaker's belief about entailment and propositional truth in sentences containing five subordinating conjunction-verb combinations: if, because, although, unless combined with indicative verbs, and if with a subjunctive verb. Children were more accurate when a speaker believed the truth of his utterance (because and although) than when he voiced disbelief (if + subjunctive) or doubt (unless and if + indicative). They were also more accurate in judging entailment when the speaker thought the events in the two clauses were positively related (if and because) than when the speaker expressed a negative relation (unless and although). The pattern of errors in judgement conformed to a pragmatic analysis of the conjunctions. First graders based their judgements on semantic cues and did not differentiate propositional truth and entailment concepts. Third and fifth graders understood the difference between entailment and propositional truth and used syntactic cues to differentiate positive from non-positive statements. However, they thought that a subordinating conjunction only determines belief about its own clause, and they did not understand the appropriate cues expressing uncertainty vs. disbelief.