title: Children's understanding of first- and third-person perspectives in complement clauses and false-belief tasks.
abstract: De Villiers (Lingua, 2007, Vol. 117, pp. 1858-1878) and others have claimed that children come to understand false belief as they acquire linguistic constructions for representing a proposition and the speaker's epistemic attitude toward that proposition. In the current study, English-speaking children of 3 and 4years of age (N=64) were asked to interpret propositional attitude constructions with a first- or third-person subject of the propositional attitude (e.g., "I think the sticker is in the red box" or "The cow thinks the sticker is in the red box", respectively). They were also assessed for an understanding of their own and others' false beliefs. We found that 4-year-olds showed a better understanding of both third-person propositional attitude constructions and false belief than their younger peers. No significant developmental differences were found for first-person propositional attitude constructions. The older children also showed a better understanding of their own false beliefs than of others' false beliefs. In addition, regression analyses suggest that the older children's comprehension of their own false beliefs was mainly related to their understanding of third-person propositional attitude constructions. These results indicate that we need to take a closer look at the propositional attitude constructions that are supposed to support children's false-belief reasoning. Children may come to understand their own and others' beliefs in different ways, and this may affect both their use and understanding of propositional attitude constructions and their performance in various types of false-belief tasks.
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YL, UK. Electronic address: s.brandt@lancaster.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Silke
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Brandt
authors.affiliation: Research Group "Kleinkindforschung in Thueringen", University of Erfurt, D-99089 Erfurt, Germany; Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Bern, 3012 Bern, Switzerland.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Buttelmann
authors.affiliation: School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK; Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany.
authors.forename: Elena
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Lieven
authors.affiliation: Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tomasello
mesh_terms: D001290:Attitude; D002675:Child, Preschool; D032882:Comprehension; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics
keywords: Complement clauses; Epistemic modality; False belief; First-language acquisition; Mental verbs; Theory-of-mind development