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

在这里报道的研究中，3至6岁的日语儿童面临着根据说话者的相互矛盾的输入做出选择，这些输入在确定程度和他们所拥有的证据的质量方面各不相同。在日语中，“实义”和“据义”既存在于高频的闭类词尾助词中，也存在于低频的心理状态动词中。我们的研究结果表明，儿童能够利用的信息编码的最后一个粒子早于信息编码的动词;和扬声器的确定性的理解先于理解的证据质量。此外，虽然研究结果总体上支持儿童对认知词汇的总体理解与他们对错误信念的理解相关的观点，但对助词的理解与错误信念的理解并不相关。 ...更多信息 在很多方面都是如此。有研究表明，在儿童导向言语中出现频率高的语言项目会在儿童头脑中获得特殊的认知突显性，因此，可能对儿童的语义和认知发展产生重大影响（Choi & Gopnik 1995; Gopnik，Choi，& Baumberger 1996）。本研究通过对日语语料库的分析，证实了母亲话语中的词尾助词频率较高，从而支持了这一假设。然而，由于我们的数据仅包含一对儿童-母亲，因此需要进一步的数据来确认确切的因果关系。我们相信，早期对粒子的理解提供了关于儿童对其他认知心理状态的理解的重要信息。我们研究中最有趣的结果之一是，对粒子的理解与对错误信念的理解无关。现在人们普遍认为，通过错误信念任务涉及心理的外显表征理论（Perner 1991）。然而，目前关于儿童是否能够在此之前掌握他人的心理状态以及如果他们做到了，如何做到这一点还没有达成共识。据报道，失败的儿童错误信念任务显示程序，无意识的把握他人的精神状态，通过眼睛凝视，这种理解被称为“内隐”理解他人的思想（克莱门茨和Perner 1994;Ruffman 2000）。我们倾向于认为，日本3岁儿童对他人知识状态的理解可能也是一种内隐理解，但内隐理解的概念本身需要进一步澄清。然而，目前的研究表明，对知识状态的一致的、有效的理解先于对（错误）信念的完全表征的理解。少

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