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Seventeen‐month‐olds appeal to false beliefs to interpret others’ referential communication
Author(s) -
Southgate Victoria,
Chevallier Coralie,
Csibra Gergely
Publication year - 2010
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/j.1467-7687.2009.00946.x
Subject(s) - psychology , attribution , ambiguity , meaning (existential) , theory of mind , context (archaeology) , cognitive psychology , false belief , cognition , gesture , mental state , nonverbal communication , social psychology , developmental psychology , linguistics , paleontology , philosophy , neuroscience , psychotherapist , biology
Recent studies have demonstrated infants’ pragmatic abilities for resolving the referential ambiguity of non‐verbal communicative gestures, and for inferring the intended meaning of a communicator’s utterances. These abilities are difficult to reconcile with the view that it is not until around 4 years that children can reason about the internal mental states of others. In the current study, we tested whether 17‐month‐old infants are able to track the status of a communicator’s epistemic state and use this to infer what she intends to refer to. Our results show that manipulating whether or not a communicator has a false belief leads infants to different interpretations of the same communicative act, and demonstrate early mental state attribution in a pragmatic context.