title: Tracking speakers' false beliefs: is theory of mind available earlier for word learning?
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.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology & Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, UK. c.houston-price@reading.ac.uk
authors.forename: Carmel
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Houston-Price
authors.forename: Kate
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Goddard
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Séclier
authors.forename: Sally C
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Grant
authors.forename: Caitlin J B
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Reid
authors.forename: Laura E
authors.initials: LE
authors.lastname: Boyden
authors.forename: Rhiannon
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Williams
mesh_terms: D001519:Behavior; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D003142:Communication; D032882:Comprehension; D003469:Culture; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D012938:Social Perception; D056345:Theory of Mind; D014706:Verbal Learning