Twice Upon a Time: Children Use Syntax to Learn the Meanings of Yesterday and Tomorrow

Time words like “yesterday” and “tomorrow” are abstract, and are interpreted relative to the context in which they are produced: the word “tomorrow” refers to a different point in time now than in 24 h. We tested 112 three- to five-year-old English- and Hindi-speaking children on their knowledge of “yesterday” and “tomorrow,” which are represented by the same word in Hindi-Urdu: “kal.” We found that Hindi learners performed better than English learners when tested on actual past and future events, but that performance for hypothetical events was poor for both groups. Compatible with a “syntactic cues” account, we conclude that syntactic tense information—which is necessary for differentiating “yesterday” from “tomorrow” in Hindi—may play a stronger role in learning the deictic status of these words than mapping of specific words to particular past and future events (“event mapping”).