Children’s Interpretation of Conditional Connectives

Previous studies have shown that the uni-conditional marker if can be interpreted biconditionally in some contexts. Similarly, the biconditional marker unless may receive a biconditional interpretation in positive quantificational contexts (e.g., every) and a uni-conditional reading in negative quantificational contexts (e.g., no). However, exceptive accounts expect unless to yield a biconditional meaning in all contexts. Our aim in this preliminary study is to provide experimental evidence about how children interpret these conditional connectives. A recent study conducted with adult Turkish speakers found that unless was not semantically biconditional in either positive quantificational contexts or negative quantificational contexts (Evcen et al. 2019). We used a similar paradigm with a child-friendly adaptation to test how if (-sA), if not (değilse), and unless (-mAdIkçA) would behave with 5-year-old children acquiring Turkish. Our preliminary results indicate that children, unlike adults, disregard the antecedent hosting the conditional connective but focus only on the consequent hosting the quantifier structure. We argue this may be related to the higher syntactic and semantic complexity in these structures incurring heavy working memory demands.