Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nr4z6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-11T17:07:19.490Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The development of mental terms: pragmatics or semantics?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Chris Moore  and
Jane Davidge
Chris Moore*
Affiliation:
Mount Saint Vincent University
Jane Davidge
Affiliation:
Mount Saint Vincent University
*
Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4J1, Canada.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The distinctions between the mental terms, know, think and sure was examined in an experiment with 60 children between three and six years of age. The children were required to find an object hidden in one of two places. Their only clues were two statements involving contrasting mental terms, with each statement referring to one of the possible hiding places. Results showed a significant improvement with age for the know-think and sure-think contrasts, with think treated as a less reliable index of location than both know and sure by four to five years of age. No change with age was found for know-sure contrast. It is concluded that by four to five years of age, children recognize the function of mental terms to express degrees of certainty, and that this understanding is probably not based on the factive properties of the terms.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , October 1989 , pp. 633 - 641
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This research was supported by Grant no. 410-87-1315 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The authors would like to express their gratitude to the staff and children of Children's Choice Nursery school, Burnside Children's Centre, and Hawthorn Elementary school, Dartmouth. Thanks also to Tom Barrett for assistance with the analysis.

References

REFERENCES

Abbeduto, L. & Rosenberg, S. (1985). Children's knowledge of the presuppositions of know and other cognitive verbs. Journal of Child Language 12. 621–41.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Astington, J. W., Harris, P. L. & Olson, D. R. (1988). Developing theories of mind. New York: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Bassano, D. (1985). Five-year-olds' understanding of ‘savoir’ and ‘croire’. Journal of Child Language 12. 417–32.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bretherton, I. & Beeghly, M. (1982). Talking about internal states: the acquisition of an explicit theory of mind. Developmental Psychology 18. 906–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bretherton, I., McNew, S. & Beeghly-Smith, M. (1981). Early person knowledge as expressed in gestural and verbal communication: when do infants acquire a ‘theory of mind’? In Lamb, M. & Sherrod, L. (eds), Infant social cognition. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Harris, R. (1975). Children's comprehension of complex sentences. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 19. 420–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopmann, M. & Maratsos, M. (1978). A developmental study of factivity and negation in complex sentences. Journal of Child Language 5. 295–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, C. N. (1982). Acquisition of mental verbs and the concept of mind. In Kuczaj, S. (ed.), Language development. Vol. 1. Syntax and semantics. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Johnson, C. N. & Maratsos, M. P. (1977). Early comprehension of mental verbs: think and know. Child Development 48. 1743–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, C. N. & Wellman, H. M. (1980). Children's developing understanding of mental verbs: remember, know, and guess. Child Development 51. 1095–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kempson, R. M. (1975). Presupposition and the delimitation of semantics. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, P. & Kiparsky, C. (1970). Fact. In Bierwisch, M. & Heidolph, K. (eds), Progress in linguistics. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Macnamara, J., Baker, E. & Olson, C. L. (1976). Four-year-olds' understanding of pretend, forget, and know: evidence for propositional operations. Child Development 47. 62–70.Google Scholar
Miscione, J. L., Marvin, R. S., O'Brien, R. G. & Greenberg, M. T. (1978). A developmental study of preschool children's understanding of the words ‘know’ and ‘guess’. Child Development 49. 1107–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, C., Bryant, D. & Furrow, D. (1989). Mental terms and the development of certainty. Child Development 60. 167–171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, C. & Furrow, D. (in press). The development of the language of mental state: the expression of certainty. In Moore, C. & Frye, D. (eds), Children's theories of mind. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Olson, D. R. & Torrance, N. G. (1986). Some relations between children's knowledge of metalinguistic and metacognitive verbs and their linguistic competencies. In Gopnik, I. & Gopnik, M. (eds), From models to modules: studies in cognitive science from the McGill workshops. Norwood NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Perner, J. (1988). Developing semantics for theories of mind: from propositional attitudes to mental representation. In Astington, J. W., Harris, P. L. & Olson, D. R. (eds), Developing theories of mind. New York: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Richards, M. M. (1982). Empiricism and learning to mean. In Kuczaj, S. (ed.), Language development Vol. 1. Syntax and semantics. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Scoville, R. P. & Gordon, A. M. (1980). Children's understanding of factive presuppositions: an experiment and a review. Journal of Child Language 7. 38199.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shatz, M., Wellman, H. M. & Silber, S. (1983). The acquisition of mental verbs: a systematic investigation of the first reference to mental state. Cognition 14. 301–21.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Urmson, J. O. (1963). Parenthetical verbs. In Caton, C. E. (ed.), Philosophy and ordinary language. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Wellman, H. M. & Johnson, C. N. (1979). Understanding mental processes: a developmental study of ‘remember’ and ‘forget’. Child Development 50. 79–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar