“Can we say …?” Children's understanding of intensionality

Abstract

Previous research has shown that children above the age of 4 years are generally able to discriminate between mental states and world states. They know, for example, that a person will continue to hold the belief that an object is in a particular place even if, unbeknownst to that person, the object is moved to a different place. The present study tested whether children of between 5 and 7 years are also able to appreciate that the verbal description of the object towards which the mental state is directed (e.g., “… thinks that the x is …”) must be constrained by the knowledge that the person has about the object. Conversely, do children of this age appreciate that when mental state verbs such as “thinks” are not employed (e.g., “… stood behind the x …”) in the sentence, the verbal description of the object is not constrained by the knowledge state of the person? The children found both kinds of verbal context difficult to appreciate; but errors were less frequent in the latter case. The data are discussed in the context of J.H. Flavell's distinction between Level 1 and Level 2 knowledge of mental representation. It is suggested that the errors reflect a lingering form of Level 1 thinking in which there is difficulty in conceiving of one situation giving rise to two different kinds of representation. This leads children to be over-influenced by the saliency of objects (in the first case) and of a protagonist's lack of knowledge (in the second case).