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Children's early theory of mind: exploring the development of the concept of desire in monolingual Spanish children
Author(s) -
Ferres Leo A.
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/1467-7687.00266
Subject(s) - psychology , developmental psychology , term (time) , language development , linguistics , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics
This paper presents the results of an analysis of the lexical term ‘querer’ (want) qua genuine reference to desire. The instances of ‘querer’ to be analyzed were taken from the naturally occurring speech of monolingual speakers of Spanish. Specifically, a database of 24,558 child utterances taken from the CHILDES system was analyzed. This corpus yielded 444 utterances with the desire term ‘querer’. The utterances belong to several children whose ages range from 21 to 46 months. The results of this study support the hypothesis that children consistently refer to desire at around 2 years of age and that children undergo a marked increase in their reference to this concept at 36 months of age, although it is not yet clear whether they start referring to their own desires before those of someone else.