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    Seventeen-month-olds appeal to false beliefs to interpret others’ referential communication

    Southgate, Victoria and Chevallier, C. and Csibra, Gergely (2010) Seventeen-month-olds appeal to false beliefs to interpret others’ referential communication. Developmental Science 13 (6), pp. 907-912. ISSN 1363-755x.

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    Abstract

    Recent studies have demonstrated infants’ pragmatic abilities for resolving the referential ambiguity of non-verbal communicative gestures, and for inferring the intended meaning of a communicator’s utterances. These abilities are difficult to reconcile with the view that it is not until around 4 years that children can reason about the internal mental states of others. In the current study, we tested whether 17-month-old infants are able to track the status of a communicator’s epistemic state and use this to infer what she intends to refer to. Our results show that manipulating whether or not a communicator has a false belief leads infants to different interpretations of the same communicative act, and demonstrate early mental state attribution in a pragmatic context.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences
    Research Centres and Institutes: Brain and Cognitive Development, Centre for (CBCD)
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 10 Dec 2014 13:47
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:14
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/11269

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