Children’s understanding of first- and third-person perspectives in complement clauses and false-belief tasks

Silke Brandt,David Buttelmann,Elena Lieven,Michael Tomasello

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2016.03.004

Abstract

De Villiers (Lingua, 2007, Vol. 117, pp. 1858–1878) and others have claimed that children come to understand false belief as they acquire linguistic constructions for representing a proposition and the speaker’s epistemic attitude toward that proposition. In the current study, English-speaking children of 3 and 4years of age (N=64) were asked to interpret propositional attitude constructions with a first- or third-person subject of the propositional attitude (e.g., “I think the sticker is in the red box” or “The cow thinks the sticker is in the red box”, respectively). They were also assessed for an understanding of their own and others’ false beliefs. We found that 4-year-olds showed a better understanding of both third-person propositional attitude constructions and false belief than their younger peers. No significant developmental differences were found for first-person propositional attitude constructions. The older children also showed a better understanding of their own false beliefs than of others’ false beliefs. In addition, regression analyses suggest that the older children’s comprehension of their own false beliefs was mainly related to their understanding of third-person propositional attitude constructions. These results indicate that we need to take a closer look at the propositional attitude constructions that are supposed to support children’s false-belief reasoning. Children may come to understand their own and others’ beliefs in different ways, and this may affect both their use and understanding of propositional attitude constructions and their performance in various types of false-belief tasks.

Highlights

A large number of studies have shown that language plays a facilitative role in children’s development of false-belief understanding
Moore and colleagues (1990) showed that, in addition, 4-year-olds’ performance in this hidden-object task was strongly correlated with their performance in various explicit tests of false belief. These findings suggest that, even though children produce first-person complements with mental verbs before they show an explicit understanding of false belief, their comprehension of first-person complements develops at the same time as they start to show an explicit understanding of false belief
A 2 (Age: 3- vs. 4-year-olds) by 2 (Condition: first- vs. third-person complements) analysis of variance (ANOVA) suggested that there was a significant interaction between age and condition, F(1, 60) = 10.56, p =

Summary

Introduction

A large number of studies have shown that language plays a facilitative role in children’s development of false-belief understanding (for overviews, see Astington & Baird, 2005; Milligan, Astington, & Dack, 2007). It is still unclear which aspects of language are responsible. In the remainder of this article, we use linguistic terminology and refer to these propositional attitude constructions as complementclause constructions or just complements. These complement-clause constructions contain a main clause expressing the attitude toward a proposition (e.g., I think) and a subordinate clause expressing that proposition (e.g., he will be late again)

Methods

Results

Conclusion