How language relates to belief, desire, and emotion understanding
Section snippets
Participants
Participants included 73 children who were tested in a longitudinal study at four different time points. Very few children dropped out but not all children received every ToM task at all time points so that analyses were always based on fewer than the full sample. Details of participant numbers, ages, and gender distribution are listed in Table 1. Mothers of the children responded to advertisements in newspapers, parent group newsletters, and a parenting magazine, and were paid £40 (Sterling)
Experiment 2
The embedded syntax test used in Experiment 2 included items of the form, “The shoe THAT IS ABOVE THE TRIANGLE is red” (embedded clause in upper case). These items require children to hold one thing in mind (the shoe) while processing another (that is above the triangle), and then to relate the first thing (shoe) to the last thing (is red). These items require children to understand something about the structure of language, for instance, that “is red” relates to the initial noun (the shoe)
General discussion
Consistent with Astington and Jenkins (1999), we found a longitudinal relation between language and belief. In their case the relation was over 10.5 months, and in ours, over 2.5 years. We found contradictory results regarding the role of semantics versus syntax. In contrast to the syntax account of Astington and Jenkins (1999), in Experiment 1, semantics was uniquely related to syntax on three of three occasions, whereas syntax did not relate once. However, in Experiment 2, performance on the
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the Economic and Social Research Council for financial support (award #R000237071).
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