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Past tense counterfactual sentences (e.g., if you had watered the plant, it would not have died) have been receiving increasing attention in research. However, previous studies reported mixed findings regarding the production of PTCF sentences. One possible reason may be that previous studies used different elicitation tasks and response modalities. To align these mixed findings and better understand the developmental trajectory of PTCF sentences, the present study employed a 2 x 2 design incorporating two elicitation tasks (sentence priming and story retelling) and two response modalities (spoken vs. written) to examine if the production of PTCF sentences varies with tasks and modalities. The study included 27 English-speaking adolescents (mean age = 16.3). We found that adolescents' production of PTCF sentences varied systematically with elicitation tasks and response modalities, with higher accuracy in a sentence priming task than in a story-retelling task and in spoken production compared to written production. These findings indicate the importance of considering the effects of tasks and modalities when assessing children’s production of specific types of complex sentences.
Doctoral research grant at Steinhardt, New York University |
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