This study describes the development of social reasoning in school-age children. An irony task is used to assess 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds' (N = 72) and adults' (N = 24) recursive understanding of others' minds. Guttman scale analysis demonstrates that in order to understand a speaker's communicative intention, a child needs to recognize the…

Numerous studies show that children's language ability is related to false-belief understanding. However, there is considerable variation in the size of the correlation reported. Using data from 104 studies (N=8,891), this meta-analysis determines the strength of the relation in children under age 7 and examines moderators that may account for the…

This study reports on an analysis of the relation between kindergarten children's developing theory of mind and their understanding of characters' actions and consciousness in story narrative, based on Bruner's (1986) notion of the dual landscapes of action and consciousness. Wordless picture books were used to model these two aspects of…