1. Tracking speakers' false beliefs: is theory of mind available earlier for word learning?
- Author
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Houston‐Price, Carmel, Goddard, Kate, Séclier, Catherine, Grant, Sally C., Reid, Caitlin J.B., Boyden, Laura E., and Williams, Rhiannon
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VOCABULARY education , *PHILOSOPHY of mind , *LEARNING ability testing , *CHILD psychology , *PROTAGONISTS (Persons) - Abstract
Happé and Loth (2002) describe word learning as a 'privileged domain' in the development of a theory of mind. We test this claim in a series of experiments based on the Sally-Anne paradigm. Three- and 4-year-old children's ability to represent others' false beliefs was investigated in tasks that required the child either to predict the actions of a protagonist in a story or to learn the meaning of a new word used by the protagonist. Experiment 1 replicated previous findings of better performance in a false belief word-learning task compared to a false belief action-prediction task. However, systematic manipulation of the task parameters in Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that this performance discrepancy disappeared when tasks were equated in their 'referential pull' (Perner, Rendl & Garnham, 2007). We conclude that the notion of a precocious theory of mind for word learning is not required to explain dissociations in performance on false belief tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2011
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