Children's ability to infer utterance veracity from speaker informedness

Children between the ages of 3 years 7 months and 6 years 5 months experienced a contradiction between what they knew or guessed to be inside a box and what they were told by an adult. The authors investigated whether children believed what they were told by asking them to make a final judgment about the box's content. Children tended to believe utterances from speakers who were better informed than they themselves were and to disbelieve those from less well-informed speakers, with no age-related differences. This behavior implies an understanding of the speaker's knowledge and suggests that children can learn from oral input while being appropriately skeptical of its truth. Children also gave explicit knowledge judgments on trials on which no utterances were given. Performance on knowledge trials was less accurate than, and unrelated to, performance on utterance trials. Research on children's developing explicit theory of mind needs to be broadened to include behavioral indexes of understanding the mind.