Language and Thought: Developmental Perspectives on Counterfactual Conditionals

Abstract

Work by Alfred Bloom, suggesting that the lack of a distinct counterfactual marker in Chinese has as a cognitive correlate the inability or unwillingness of Chinese speakers to think counterfactually, elicited a would-be replication and refutation from Terry Kit-Fong Au. Capitalizing on Au's radical modifications of the original experimental design, Bloom was able to turn Au's refutation into a strengthening of his own position. In the present study developmental data from English, Afrikaans and Northern Sotho children, supplemented by data from English and Afrikaans adults, were used to question certain aspects of the Bloom-Au methodology, and of the interpretation of their results. In the absence of control data Bloom's claim that differences between the performance of his English and Chinese subjects are due to the variable ‘counterfactuality’ seems unjustified. The Bloom-Au response-elicitation procedure seems to contain a systematic bias towards responses suggesting counterfactual thinking, which would tend to inflate the end-state of the development under discussion. The assumption that any counterfactual stimulus would per se elicit an appropriate response from speakers of a ‘counterfactual’ language seems suspect.