Bridging the gap between implicit and explicit understanding: How language development promotes the processing and representation of false belief

Abstract

Recent advancements in the field of infant false-belief reasoning have brought into question whether performance on implicit and explicit measures of false belief is driven by the same level of representational understanding. The success of infants on implicit measures has also raised doubt over the role that language development plays in the development of false-belief reasoning. In the current paper, we argue that children's performance on disparate measures cannot be used to infer similarities in understanding across different age groups. Instead, we argue that development must continue to occur between the periods when children can reason implicitly and then explicitly about false belief. We then propose mechanisms by which language associated with false-belief tasks facilitates this transition by assisting with both the processes of elicited response selection and the formation of metarepresentational understanding.

Collaborative mother–toddler communication and theory of mind development at age 4

“…The emerging ability to use language as means for communication and representation is necessary for early social understanding and deemed to be a covariate for empirical investigation (for reviews, see Hughes, 2011; San Juan & Astington, 2012). In addition to a general link between children’s linguistic skills and ToM, complex connections exist between language and ToM at the structural (i.e., semantics and syntax) and functional (e.g., pragmatics) levels.…”

“…A key indicator of such ability, known as “theory of mind” (ToM), is a child’s understanding that beliefs of representations of reality can be false. In spite of individual differences, young children show normative development progressing from consistently failing to consistently passing explicit, verbal (i.e., elicited-response) false belief tasks between ages 3 to 5 (e.g., Astington & Jenkins, 1995; Bartsch & Wellman, 1995; Dunn, 2004; for recent reviews, see Apperly, 2012; San Juan & Asington, 2012). Using diverse implicit, nonverbal (i.e., spontaneous-response) tasks, impressive research in the past decade has further shown that children’s ToM ability may begin to emerge in infancy as young as 7 months of age (Kovács, Téglás, & Endress, 2010; for reviews see Baillargeon, Scott, & He, 2010; Liszkowski, 2013; Sodian, 2011).…”

“…Cognitive constructivist perspectives highlight structural changes in children’s mental state representations, in which the child is seen as a lone-working scientist deriving correct theories on his or her own (e.g., Leslie, 1994; Wellman, 1992). These cognitive approaches rarely address questions about individual differences or their social-interactional origins (Apperly, 2012; Liszkowski, 2013; San Juan & Astington, 2012). By contrast, social constructive perspectives propose that children develop ToM through interpersonal processes.…”

“…With repeated practice, complex abstractions, interpretation, and predictions about others’ actions become possible, which are further used for regulating social interactions (Astington, 2003) and inferring cultural meanings (Feldman, 2000). Although language is often theorized as a mechanism for the developmental transition between early implicit and later explicit understanding of mind (e.g., San Juan & Astington, 2012), theorists also differ in their conceptualizations about the role of language. Nelson (2005) proposes that children enter adults’ “communities of minds” by participating in a discourse about social interactions and accumulating meaningful shared experiences with others.…”

Why Roma Children Need Language Asessments in Romani

“…Digit span is an index of verbal memory, likely to relate to sentence repetition, though sentence repetition involves the additional factor of morphosyntax understanding. Theory of Mind, especially understanding another's false belief, has been found to be linked to language skills, whether the measure is general vocabulary (Astington & Baird, 2005), general syntax (Farrar, Benigno, Tompkins & Gage, 2017), or specifically sentence complementation (San Juan & Astington, 2012;de Villiers & de Villiers, 2013).…”