THE ACQUISITION OF CONDITIONALS IN ENGLISH

The conditional system in English is semantically and morphologically complex; children start to produce conditionals at about two-and-a-half, but the full system is not mastered until age nine. Due to this extended time period and the complexity of conditionals, a study of their acquisition provides an opportunity not only to examine the growth of conditionals but also to investigate a number of issues pertinent to the general language learning process.;Results of the study show that the two- and three-year-olds use conditionals to refer to present situations and to predict probable unrealized contingencies. Even though some twos and all the threes control the simple conditional morphology, they deny subjunctive counterfactual conditionals and relate them to personal experience, e.g. "What if you were a bird?" I'm not a bird, just a people. The fours can use conditionals to refer to events diverging from the real world, and, although the requisite morphology does not appear until eight, they do comprehend hypothetical and counterfactual conditionals. The gains at six, seven, and eight are morphological.;Language skills grow in fits and starts: the acquisition of a structure sometimes precedes and other times follows the acquisition of its cognitive correlate; a child may produce structures he does not fully comprehend, and he can also comprehend structures he cannot produce.;Language and cognition are independent yet interactive systems where cognitive development is basically responsible for the sequence of acquisition, but it is the linguistic complexity of a structure that determines when that structure will appear in a child's grammar; pragmatic and sociolinguistic factors are also influential.;Using Schachter's (1971) semantic model of conditionals I collected longitudinal naturalistic data from three children aged 18 months to four, and cross-sectional experimental data from 28 children aged two to nine.