This paper revisits Chinese counterfactuality with 要不是 yàobúshì 'if it were not' by
presenting additional data from elementary school children and high school teenagers
to determine the availability of counterfactual reasoning with psycholinguistic studies.
Constituent comparisons of propositional representations were hypothesized in the
mental model of sentence processing. Results indicate both developmental groups
processed counterfactuals with yàobúshì similarly to college students, demonstrating
that the mismatch of structures and semantics does not exist in counterfactuals with
yàobúshì in Chinese. Relevance to theory of mind in processing counterfactuality with
Chinese as an example is proposed and discussed.

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• Linking counterfactuality with theory of mind: evidence from developmental studies with Yàobúshì in Chinese