Modal language in preschool children
How does children’s use of modal expressions relate to their conceptual understanding of possibility? And how do language comprehension and task demands shape our judgement of that ability?
A small study of modal language, planned to run alongside an existing study of how preschool children reason about possibilities. The formal analysis specifies what modal expressions contribute; the thesis asks how children come to understand them. The thesis itself includes no language-model study, but the order in which children come to distinguish possibility from necessity can then serve as a target for studying how language models learn the same distinction.
The connection to the formal analysis
Three Ways of Leaving p Unsettled examines what possibility claims, explicit two-sided openness, and ignorance reports contribute to discourse. The thesis asks a developmental question about expressions of this kind: what preschool children understand when they hear them, and how that understanding relates to the way they reason about possibilities. The formal analysis suggests which contrasts are worth testing; it does not establish what children know.
A study with preschool children
The study is part of an ongoing PhD project at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, which tests how preschool children reason about possibilities; the language component is added to that design. It is to be run at the institute, under its ethics approval and with its participant pool and testing facilities. Which expressions are compared, the age range, the materials, and the measures are still being agreed. If children’s performance on the language task is related to their reasoning in the existing study, that shows an association. It would not show that language drives the development of reasoning about possibilities.
Language models
The thesis includes no language-model study. Comparing the developmental order it finds with how language models learn the same distinction belongs to separate work.
Status
The thesis is being planned. No data have been collected, and there are no results.