Discrepant Utterances Resulting from a False Belief: Children's Evaluations

Abstract

4–7-year-olds listened to message-desire discrepant stories in which a speaker doll, who believed wrongly that bag A was in location 1 and bag B in location 2, asked for the bag in location 1 (a request that should be treated as referentially opaque). In the first investigation, many children interpreted the utterance correctly, saying that the speaker really wanted the bag in location 2, yet wrongly evaluated the utterance positively, saying that the speaker had done a good job. Children found it no easier to evaluate the message-desire discrepant utterances negatively, than to evaluate ambiguous ones that way. However, in Investigation 2, children found it just as easy to judge that the speaker of a message-desire discrepant utterance had said the wrong thing, as they did to interpret the utterance nonliterally by taking into account the speaker's false belief. Moreover, Investigation 3 showed that children were more likely to judge that the speaker of a message-desire discrepant utterance had said the wrong thing, than to judge that she had done a bad job. The findings suggest that, contrary to previous arguments, young children can refrain from a performative response and, as a consequence, attend to the literal meaning under some conditions when evaluating utterances.