ERIC Number: EJ1328074
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2022-Feb
Pages: 30
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0142-7237
EISSN: N/A
Linguistic Cues Facilitate Children's Understanding of Belief-Reporting Sentences
Zhang, Xiaowen; Zhou, Peng
First Language, v42 n1 p51-80 Feb 2022
It has been well-documented that although children around 4 years start to attribute false beliefs to others in classic false-belief tasks, they are still less able to evaluate the truth-value of propositional belief-reporting sentences, especially when belief conflicts with reality. This article investigates whether linguistic cues, verb factivity in particular, can facilitate children's understanding of belief-reporting sentences. Two experiments were implemented, one testing children's knowledge of verb factivity using a gold medal task, and one investigating children's interpretation of belief-reporting sentences using a truth-value-judgment task. Both experiments took advantage of the contrast between neutral non-factive mental verbs and strong negatively biased mental verbs. What sets the two apart is that the complement clause following a strong negatively biased mental verb is definitely false, whereas the one following a neutral non-factive mental verb remains indeterminate in the absence of additional information. The findings were that, first, 4-year-old children were able to tell the difference between the two types of mental verbs in factivity, and second, children's performance was significantly improved when a strong negatively biased mental verb than when a neutral non-factive mental verb was used as the main verb of the belief-reporting sentences. The findings suggest that the use of strong negatively biased mental verbs facilitates children's understanding of belief-reporting sentences. Implications of the findings are discussed in relation to the underlying mechanisms connecting verb factivity and false-belief understanding.
Descriptors: Preschool Children, Beliefs, Task Analysis, Sentences, Language Acquisition, Cues, Verbs, Language Processing, Deception, Decision Making, Child Development, Kindergarten, Mandarin Chinese, Foreign Countries
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Early Childhood Education; Elementary Education; Kindergarten; Primary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: China (Beijing)
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Data File: URL: https://osf.io/s9vzf/?view_only=295593bb1e5c45fbb903551dbaaec15a