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Children’s ability to ascribe beliefs to themselves and others has been shown to develop in the late preschool and early school years. This ability to represent, that is to think about, beliefs known to be false is described as metarepresentational development. This article extends these findings to the domain of linguistic representations by exploring how children come to judge statements as true or false of a given reality. It presents two models of judgment, one based on the pragmatics of the expression, the other on the basis of the semantics of the expression. Two studies show that when preschoolers object to what someone has said, they are disagreeing with the speaker, a pragmatic judgment, rather than judging the truth or falsity of what the speaker has said, a semantic judgment. True/false judgments are metalinguistic judgments, later acquired, suggesting a new consciousness of linguistic form. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Children's understanding of the role of evidence in the formation of beliefs was examined by having 4- to 8-year-olds judge what another would ‘think’ or ‘know’ when confronted with ambiguous and unambiguous evidence and then asking them to justify their judgements. Whereas younger children's ascriptions tended to be based on their own beliefs about the situation, older children tended to ascribe knowledge to others on the basis of the evidence available to those others. However, even 6- and 7-year-olds had some difficulty grasping the relation between critical or unambiguous evidence and knowledge, and in basing their ascriptions of knowledge exclusively on the availability of such evidence. Two important transitions in epistemological understanding were observed. The first at about 5½ years of age was the transition from ascribing beliefs to others on the basis of one's own beliefs to ascribing them on the basis of the evidence available to that person — a transition that may depend on their understanding of the possibility of someone holding a false belief; the second was the transition from 6 to 7 years of age when they begin W understand the implications of critical evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]