Young children's understanding of function words and their developing theory of mind

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In the study reported here, Japanese-speaking children aged 3 to 6 were confronted with making choices based on conflicting input from speakers who varied in the degree of certainty and the quality of evidence they possessed for their opinions. Certainty and evidentiality are encoded in Japanese both in high-frequency ; closed-class, sentence-final particles and also in low-frequency, mental state verbs. Our results suggest that children are able to make use of information encoded in the sentence-final particles earlier than information encoded in verbs ; and that understanding of speaker certainty precedes understanding of quality of evidence. Furthermore, although the results generally support the position that children's overall understanding of epistemic vocabulary correlates with their understanding of false-belief, understanding of the sentence-final particles tested did not correlate with false-belief understanding.That particles are understood earlier than verbs are can be acco … More unted for in a number of ways. It has been suggested that linguistic items that appear with high frequency in child-directed speech will receive special cognitive salience in child's mind, and as such, may have significant influence to a child's semantic and cognitive development (Choi & Gopnik 1995; Gopnik, Choi, & Baumberger 1996). In the present study, the analysis of Japanese corpus data confirmed the high frequency of sentence-final particles in the mother's speech, and thus, the result tends to support this hypothesis. However, as our data consists of only one child-mother pair, further data is needed to confirm the exact causal relations.It is our belief that early understanding of particles provides important information about children's understanding of other's epistemic mental states in general. One of the most intriguing results of our study is that understanding of particles does not correlate with understanding of false-belief. It is now widely assumed that passing false-belief tasks involves explicit representational theory of mind (Perner 1991). However, there is currently little agreement as to whether children can grasp others' mental states prior to that, and if they do, how. It has been reported that children who fail false-belief tasks show procedural, unconscious grasp of other's mental states through eye-gaze, and such understanding has been called ‘implicit' understanding of another's mind (Clements & Perner 1994;Ruffman 2000). We are inclined to believe that Japanese 3-year-olds' understanding of other's knowledge states may similarly be of an implicit kind, though the concept of implicit understanding itself requires further clarification. What the current study has shown, however, is that a consistent, working understanding of knowledge states precedes fully representational understanding of (false) beliefs. Less