Linguistic Cues Facilitate Children's Understanding of Belief-Reporting Sentences

Autor/inn/en	Zhang, Xiaowen; Zhou, Peng
Titel	Linguistic Cues Facilitate Children's Understanding of Belief-Reporting Sentences
Quelle	In: First Language, 42 (2022) 1, S.51-80 (30 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Zusatzinformation	ORCID (Zhou, Peng)
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0142-7237
DOI	10.1177/01427237211048669
Schlagwörter	Preschool Children; Beliefs; Task Analysis; Sentences; Language Acquisition; Cues; Verbs; Language Processing; Deception; Decision Making; Child Development; Kindergarten; Mandarin Chinese; Foreign Countries; China (Beijing) + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Pre-school age; Preschool age; Child; Children; Pre-school education; Preschool education; Vorschulalter; Kind; Kinder; Vorschulkind; Vorschulkinder; Vorschulerziehung; Vorschule; Belief; Glaube; Aufgabenanalyse; Sentence analysis; Satzanalyse; Sprachaneignung; Spracherwerb; Stichwort; Sprachverarbeitung; Täuschung; Decision-making; Entscheidungsfindung; Kindesentwicklung; Ausland
Abstract	It has been well-documented that although children around 4 years start to attribute false beliefs to others in classic false-belief tasks, they are still less able to evaluate the truth-value of propositional belief-reporting sentences, especially when belief conflicts with reality. This article investigates whether linguistic cues, verb factivity in particular, can facilitate children's understanding of belief-reporting sentences. Two experiments were implemented, one testing children's knowledge of verb factivity using a gold medal task, and one investigating children's interpretation of belief-reporting sentences using a truth-value-judgment task. Both experiments took advantage of the contrast between neutral non-factive mental verbs and strong negatively biased mental verbs. What sets the two apart is that the complement clause following a strong negatively biased mental verb is definitely false, whereas the one following a neutral non-factive mental verb remains indeterminate in the absence of additional information. The findings were that, first, 4-year-old children were able to tell the difference between the two types of mental verbs in factivity, and second, children's performance was significantly improved when a strong negatively biased mental verb than when a neutral non-factive mental verb was used as the main verb of the belief-reporting sentences. The findings suggest that the use of strong negatively biased mental verbs facilitates children's understanding of belief-reporting sentences. Implications of the findings are discussed in relation to the underlying mechanisms connecting verb factivity and false-belief understanding. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01