Linking counterfactuality with theory of mind: evidence from developmental studies with Yàobúshì in Chinese
Tóm tắt
This paper revisits Chinese counterfactuality with 要不是 yàobúshì 'if it were not' by presenting additional data from elementary school children and high school teenagers to determine the availability of counterfactual reasoning with psycholinguistic studies. Constituent comparisons of propositional representations were hypothesized in the mental model of sentence processing. Results indicate both developmental groups processed counterfactuals with yàobúshì similarly to college students, demonstrating that the mismatch of structures and semantics does not exist in counterfactuals with yàobúshì in Chinese. Relevance to theory of mind in processing counterfactuality with Chinese as an example is proposed and discussed.
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