I n this research project I investigate young children's understanding and production of conditionals. Specifically, I examine when and how young children start to understand the conditional concept of "if-then" in statements like, "If you were a dinosaur, what would you do?" or "What if the lion didn't have the sharp teeth?" Furthermore, I examine and analyze children's own production of conditional sentences. The goal of my research is to better understand the relationship between conditional language and conditional thought in children. I include both English- and Chinese-speaking children in my study for purposes of a cross-linguistic comparison.

    I conducted two sub-studies in this research project: an observational and an experimental study. For the observational study, two Child Study Center mother-and-child dyads were separately videotaped for a 15 to 20-minute book-reading session each month beginning in January. One dyad is a native speaker of English. The other dyad is a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese.

    In the experimental study, seven children at the Child Study Center participated. Each child was read stories from children's books by the researcher, then conditional questions with "If . . . " or "What if . . . " were asked and elicited based on the content of the stories. The story and question sessions ranged from 10 to 20 minutes and all the sessions were videotaped as well.

    Both observational and experimental study video tapes were then transcribed and analyzed based on the conditional statements and questions found in the data. Preliminary findings show that

1. in the book-reading sessions, the mother tended to provide rich language input, i.e., there was a lot of modeling, mimicking, imitation, and other meaningful interactions to support the children's use of language during each session. Such adult input and interaction is extremely helpful for the child's language learning and for the development of the child's verbal skills.

2. both in the book-reading and story-question sessions, all the children could understand "If" or "What if" questions really well, especially the four-year-olds. However, not all of them could produce conditional sentences without help; younger children, particularly three-year-olds, had more difficulties than the older children.