Previous theories have established the mental model activation of processing different types of conditionals, stating that counterfactual conditionals expressing events that contradict known facts (e.g., "If it had rained, then they would not go to the park.") are considered to trigger two mental models: (1) a hypothetical but factually wrong model (e.g., "rain" and "did not go to the park") and (2) a corresponding real-world model (e.g., "did not rain" and "went to the park"). This study aimed to investigate whether pragmatic factors differentially influence readers' comprehension and distinction between counterfactual and hypothetical conditional sentences in Mandarin Chinese. Participants were required to read and judge the comprehensibility of Chinese hypothetical and counterfactual conditionals, which were different in temporal indicators (past vs. future temporal indicators) in the antecedent. Different polarities (with vs. without negators) and different moving directions (different directional verbs:
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Kong et al. (2024) studied this question.
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