The past is “fake”: Facilitated processing of wishes compared with counterfactual conditionals in 4- and 5-year-olds

Understanding counterfactual utterances, such as “If dinosaurs were still alive, we could see them in the zoo,” requires entertaining alternatives to reality. Children’s relatively late comprehension of counterfactual language is often attributed to its cognitive complexity. However, counterfactuals also present linguistic challenges, such as the misleading “fake” past tense that signals counterfactuality rather than referencing a past event. In our study, we investigated whether linguistic complexity influences children’s counterfactual comprehension. We compared two constructions that differ in their dedication to expressing counterfactual meaning and examined whether the “fake” past tense leads children to misinterpret counterfactuals as referring to real past events. The results of a referent selection task with 23 American English-speaking 4- and 5-year-olds and 30 adults show that the performance of children and some adults was facilitated in the linguistically more transparent counterfactual wish-constructions (e.g., “I wish he had a banana milkshake”) compared with more complex counterfactual conditionals (“If he had a banana milkshake, he would give me a banana coin”). This suggests that difficulties in comprehending counterfactual conditionals may stem more from linguistic challenges than from an inability to reason counterfactually. We argue that the counterfactual’s misleading morphological information—the “fake” past—sometimes leads to misinterpretation, by children and even some adults, as referring to a “real” past. Together, these results highlight how the clarity of a construction’s linguistic form affects both the age at which it is acquired and how easily it is processed, challenging the view that counterfactual comprehension difficulties are purely conceptual.