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It's not that Chinese listeners do not understand counterfactuals. The original researcher's (Bloom) hypothesis was that Chinese speakers have more cognitive lo
by Jun8 12y ago
It's not that Chinese listeners do not understand counterfactuals. The original researcher's (Bloom) hypothesis was that Chinese speakers have more cognitive load analyzing such statements so if asked to analyze complicated small counterfactual stories under time pressure they would perform worse than English speakers.
- Tloewald 12y agoThat's probably debatable too. Most of the exotic tenses in English are wordy constructs "building" the tense out of simpler tenses. He wound have gone to dinner with mom vs. he went(hypothetical tense, assuming previous clause) to dinner with mom. A chinese speaker might say I go to movie tomorrow, versus. I will go to the movie tomorrow. Which is harder to parse? Is parsing English "tenses" so much easier? OTOH is needing to remember even more tenses for more irregular verbs easier? It's an interesting hypothesis, but hardly a foregone conclusion.