title: False-belief understanding in 2.5-year-olds: evidence from two novel verbal spontaneous-response tasks.
abstract: Recent research indicates that toddlers and infants succeed at various non-verbal spontaneous-response false-belief tasks; here we asked whether toddlers would also succeed at verbal spontaneous-response false-belief tasks that imposed significant linguistic demands. We tested 2.5-year-olds using two novel tasks: a preferential-looking task in which children listened to a false-belief story while looking at a picture book (with matching and non-matching pictures), and a violation-of-expectation task in which children watched an adult 'Subject' answer (correctly or incorrectly) a standard false-belief question. Positive results were obtained with both tasks, despite their linguistic demands. These results (1) support the distinction between spontaneous- and elicited-response tasks by showing that toddlers succeed at verbal false-belief tasks that do not require them to answer direct questions about agents' false beliefs, (2) reinforce claims of robust continuity in early false-belief understanding as assessed by spontaneous-response tasks, and (3) provide researchers with new experimental tasks for exploring early false-belief understanding in neurotypical and autistic populations.
authors.affiliation: School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, University of California Merced, USA.
authors.forename: Rose M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Scott
authors.forename: Zijing
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: He
authors.forename: Renée
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Baillargeon
authors.forename: Denise
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Cummins
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*