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Children's understanding that utterances emanate from minds: using speaker belief to aid interpretation
P Mitchell1, E J Robinson, D E Thompson
1School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, UK.
Cognition
|October 16, 1999
Summary
Children under six struggle to interpret utterances based on false beliefs. However, they can use speaker beliefs to resolve ambiguity, indicating developing theory of mind skills.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Development
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistic Comprehension
Background:
- Children's ability to understand utterances relies on integrating literal meaning with speaker intentions.
- False belief understanding is a key component of theory of mind, crucial for interpreting indirect speech acts.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how children aged 3-6 years interpret utterances in relation to a speaker's false belief.
- To examine the developmental trajectory of integrating speaker belief with utterance meaning for referential interpretation.
Main Methods:
- Children were presented with scenarios involving false beliefs and ambiguous or unambiguous utterances.
- Performance was assessed by asking children to identify the intended referent based on the utterance and the protagonist's belief state.
Main Results:
- Four and five-year-olds incorrectly interpreted utterances when the speaker held a false belief about the referent's location.
- Children successfully used speaker belief information to resolve ambiguity in utterances, particularly those aged 3-6 years.
- Utterance type influenced interpretation difficulty, with simpler, non-belief-dependent utterances being easier.
Conclusions:
- Children's ability to integrate speaker beliefs with utterance meaning develops gradually, with significant improvements observed beyond age 5.
- Successful disambiguation of utterances using speaker belief information suggests developing theory of mind capabilities in preschool and early school-aged children.
- These findings highlight the complexity of utterance comprehension and its connection to sophisticated cognitive abilities like understanding mental states.