Counterfactual Reasoning in Children: Evidence from an Eye-Tracking Study with Turkish-Speakers

Previous research has produced mixed results regarding the ability of children as young as four years of age to engage in counterfactual reasoning. In this study, we employed a visual world eye-tracking paradigm to examine how children and adults process counterfactuals. Specifically, we investigated their ability to incrementally integrate the morphosyntactic cues of counterfactual constructions in Turkish, a language that encodes counterfactual meaning through concatenated verbal suffixes. Our findings revealed that both adults and children directed their attention to the target referent upon hearing the verb conjugation of the antecedent in counterfactual sentences. This result suggests that children as young as four years old can incrementally interpret counterfactual conditionals using morphosyntactic markers, much like adults. To our knowledge, this study provides the first evidence that morphosyntactic markers on verbs can trigger complex inferences, such as the generation of hypothetical alternative worlds for counterfactual reasoning, not only in adults but also in very young children.