Chinese children's understanding of false beliefs: the role of language.

Abstract

The present study investigated the universality of the early development of young children's understanding and representation of false beliefs, and specifically, the effect of language on Chinese-speaking children's performance in false belief tasks under three between-subjects conditions. The three conditions differed only in the belief verb that was used in probe questions regarding one's own or another person's beliefs namely the Chinese verbs, xiang, yiwei, and dang. While the three words are all appropriate to false beliefs, they have different connotations regarding the likelihood of a belief being false, with xiang being more neutral than either yiwei or dang. Experiment 1 involved thirty-five Chinese-speaking adults who responded to false belief tasks to be used in Experiment 2 in order both to establish an adult comparison and to obtain empirical evidence regarding how Chinese-speaking adults use the three belief verbs to describe different false belief situations. In Experiment 2, 188 three-, four-, and five-year-old Chinese-speaking children participated in three false belief tasks. They were asked to report about an individual's false belief when either xiang, yiwei, or dang was used in the probe question. Results revealed a rapid developmental pattern in Chinese-speaking children's understanding of false belief, which is similar to that found with Western children. In addition, children performed significantly better when yiwei and dang, which connote that the belief referred to may be false, were used in belief questions than when xiang, the more neutral verb, was used. This finding suggests an important role of language in assessing children's understanding of belief and false belief.