Seventeen-month-olds appeal to false beliefs to interpret others' referential communication.
Recent studies have demonstrated infants' pragmatic abilities for resolving the referential ambiguity of non-verbal communicative gestures, and for inferring the intended meaning of a communicator's utterances. These abilities are difficult to reconcile with the view that it is not until around 4 years that children can reason about the internal mental states of others. In the current study, we tested whether 17-month-old infants are able to track the status of a communicator's epistemic state and use this to infer what she intends to refer to. Our results show that manipulating whether or not a communicator has a false belief leads infants to different interpretations of the same communicative act, and demonstrate early mental state attribution in a pragmatic context.
Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, School of Psychology, Birkbeck, University of London, UK. v.southgate@bbk.ac.uk
Victoria
V
Southgate
Coralie
C
Chevallier
Gergely
G
Csibra
D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D008192:Deception; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D009633:Nonverbal Communication / Q000502:physiology*; D012938:Social Perception; D056345:Theory of Mind / Q000502:physiology*