Southern Peruvian Quechua is an indigenous language spoken primarily in rural communities in the Peruvian Andes. The language includes a syntactic construction, "-paq", that expresses purpose or function, thus providing an opportunity to trace how parents and children with little formal education express teleological concepts. The…

Examined children's understanding of false belief, representational change, and appearance-reality distinction. Subjects were 34 Junin Quechuan children, 4 to 8 years old. Findings indicated an understanding of the appearance-reality distinction and suggested an improvement with age. Children demonstrated poor understanding of representational…

Three different theory of mind tasks were conducted with 4- to 8-year-old Quechua peasant children in the Peruvian Andes. The study investigated the ways in which children in preliterate cultures think and the possibility that they think differently than children in literate cultures. The tasks included: (1) a false-belief task, which tested the…