Oral retelling portrays what one understands from reading or listening to a text. The retold stories of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often show macrostructural (overall story structure) difficulties. The study's purpose was to compare macrostructure oral story retelling, after reading (visual modality) or listening (auditory…

This study examined children's understanding of irony when a difference existed between a speaker's intended meaning and a listener's interpretation of the meaning. Three irony contexts were presented to 87 7/8-year-olds (second graders), 90 11/12-year-olds (sixth graders), and 103 adults. In the normal irony context, the speaker intended to…

When and how do children develop an understanding of the subjectivity of intentions? Intentions are subjective mental states in many ways. One way concerns their aspectuality: Whether or not a given behavior constitutes an intentional action depends on how, under which aspect, the agent represents it. Oedipus, for example, intended to marry…

It has been debated whether the progressive emergence of theory of mind (ToM) in autistic children is compatible with a "delayed" or "different" development model, and whether and how the sequential consolidation of ToM concepts is subject to cross-cultural variations in autistic and typically developing (TD) children. To study…

Previous research has consistently demonstrated that false-belief (FB) understanding correlates with and predicts metalinguistic ability in preschoolers. Surprisingly, however, there is scant evidence on the question of whether this relation persists at later ages. The present cross-sectional study sought to fill this gap by examining the…

This study investigated two different expressions of the so-called curse of knowledge in primary school children: hindsight bias and outcome bias. Further, it explored the possible predictive function of false belief understanding in reducing these biases. Ninety-one children aged 7, 9, and 11 years (middle- to upper-middle class) were…

First-order and advanced theory of mind (ToM and AToM), and their structures and relations were investigated in 229 children aged 5-8 years. ToM was assessed using 6 tasks from the first-order ToM scale, while AToM was measured using an 18-item battery (higher-order false-belief understanding; strange stories; faux pas test; eyes test;…

Understanding that other people hold different mental states and that they may be changed is the core of persuasion. Thus, theory of mind (ToM) abilities are fundamental to generate persuasive arguments. To date, only the relation between false belief and false belief-emotion understanding and persuasion has been investigated, ignoring other…

The study of social cognition involves the attribution of states of mind to humans, as well as, quite recently, to nonhuman creatures, like God. Some studies support the role of social cognition in religious beliefs, whereas others ascribe religious beliefs to an ontological knowledge bias. The present study compares these distinct approaches in…

In everyday life, we use folk theories about the mind and behavior to understand ourselves and others. An important part of our folk theory of mind is our intuitions about the role of the self in mental functioning--namely, whether the self is able to control each mental operation. The current study explored beliefs about the nature of control…

We investigated links between persuasive behavior and theory of mind (ToM) understanding using a novel naturalistic peer persuasion task in which children were invited to convince an interactive puppet to eat raw broccoli or brush his teeth. Sixty-three 3- to 8-year-olds (M age = 6 years, 6 months) took part in the persuasion task and were also…

Links between young children's everyday use of mindful conversational skills and their success on laboratory tests of theory of mind understanding (ToM) were evaluated. Using published scales, teachers rated the conversational behavior and shyness of 129 children aged 60 to 101 months (M = 78·8 months) who were in their first years of primary…

This research examined children's performance on second-order false belief tasks as a function of the content area for the belief and the method of assessing understanding. A total of 70 kindergarten and first-grade children responded to four second-order stories. On two stories, the task was to judge a belief about a belief, and on two, the…

This study examined the development of children's reasoning about the afterlife and its relationship with parental afterlife beliefs and testimony. A total of 123 children aged 5, 7, and 10 years were read a story describing the events that led to a person's death. After hearing the story, children were asked questions about the dead agent's…

Even when they have good language skills, many children with hearing loss lag several years behind hearing children in the ability to grasp beliefs of others. The researchers sought to determine whether this lag results from difficulty with the verbal demands of tasks or from conceptual delays. The researchers related children's performance on a…