Review
The Acquisition of Modal Concepts

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Highlights

  • Infants and non-human animals pass tasks that show that they can run simulations and generate hypotheses. Do infants and non-human animals have modal concepts?

  • Children struggle with simple tasks that require them to consider multiple possibilities simultaneously until about age 4. This is surprising if infants have modal concepts.

  • A distinction between minimal representations of possibilities and modal representations of possibilities resolves this tension. Only modal representations of possibilities use modal concepts. Minimal representations of possibilities are sufficient for passing the infant and non-human animal tasks.

  • Children start talking about possibilities by the time they are 2 or 3 years old, but it is not clear what concepts they express with their modal vocabulary.

  • Learning to speak the language of possibilities may provide a workspace for developing modal concepts.

Sometimes we accept propositions, sometimes we reject them, and sometimes we take propositions to be worth considering but not yet established, as merely possible. The result is a complex representation with logical structure. Is the ability to mark propositions as merely possible part of our innate representational toolbox or does it await development, perhaps relying on language acquisition? Several lines of inquiry show that preverbal infants manage possibilities in complex ways, while others find that preschoolers manage possibilities poorly. Here, we discuss how this apparent conflict can be resolved by distinguishing modal representations of possibility, which mark possibility symbolically, from minimal representations of possibility, which do not encode any modal status and need not have a logical structure.

Section snippets

Why Study Modal Representations?

The origins of the human capacity for logically complex representations (see Glossary) have been the subject of a priori philosophical arguments at least since Descartes [1], who argued that only linguistically competent humans could entertain such thoughts (see also [2]). However, this question is not to be settled from the armchair. We need empirical studies that show which, if any, logical concepts nonlinguistic individuals deploy, and we must describe how these capacities develop, both over

Prelinguistic Humans and Nonlinguistic Animals Represent Possibilities

At least four sources of data have been taken to show that modal representations of possibility arise in nonlinguistic thought, in animals, and in infants before they master the language of modality.

Failures to Distinguish Certainty from Uncertainty

While 20-month-olds opt out (ask for help) in ways that take their uncertainty into account, toddlers, non-human animals, and preschoolers younger than age 4 often fail to reliably distinguish certainty and uncertainty when planning actions. For example, when a sticker is hidden in one of two occluded cups, and then a second sticker is hidden in a third occluded cup (Figure 2B), then the first sticker could be in either of the first two cups, while the second sticker is certainly in the third

Resolving the Infant’s Successes and the Preschooler’s Failures

The previous two sections showed conflicting results: on the one hand, there are several tasks that infants and nonlinguistic animals pass that appear to demand taking possibilities into account. On the other hand, several apparently simple tasks requiring the same abilities are difficult for children until around age 4. We see two strategies for reconciling this conflict. First, the tasks posed to preschoolers may underestimate their capacity for modal representations. For example,

Acquiring the Language of Modal Concepts

Language expresses modal concepts in many ways, in modal auxiliaries (e.g., ‘might’, ‘must’, ‘can’, or ‘can’t’) and other words (‘maybe’, ‘possibly’, ‘necessarily’, or ‘impossible’) [6]. If the modal concepts that support meanings of these linguistic expressions are not available to children below age 4 or so, 2- and 3-year-olds should not be able to comprehend the natural language expressions that encode the language of modality. Box 4 points to the current evidence that children do continue

Concluding Remarks

The pattern of infant and animal successes on tasks related to modality contrasts strikingly with preschoolers’ failures on other simple modality tasks. This conflict can be resolved by distinguishing modal representations of possibility from minimal representations of possibility. Modal representations of possibility are logically structured. They use a symbolic operator whose function is to mark representations as merely candidates for actuality, members of a set of alternatives that cannot

Acknowledgments

Funding for this research, in part, was provided by a McDonnell Foundation Network Grant: ‘The Ontogenetic Origins of Abstract Combinatorial Thought’.

Glossary

Epistemic modals
can be characterized semantically or syntactically. Semantically, their meaning is sensitive to an epistemic state: ‘Given what we have learned, the culprit must be Jones’ rather than, for example, a set of rules: ‘Given what the rules are, Jones must not park there’. Syntactically, epistemics scope above tense and aspect, unlike root modals.
Logically complex representation
structured representation including at least one logical concept.
Logical concepts
concepts that operate on

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