Linguistic cues facilitate children’s understanding of belief-reporting sentences

2021 ◽  
pp. 014272372110486
Author(s):  
Xiaowen Zhang ◽  
Peng Zhou
Keyword(s):  
Gold Medal ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Linguistic Cues ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
Mental Verbs

It has been well-documented that although children around 4 years start to attribute false beliefs to others in classic false-belief tasks, they are still less able to evaluate the truth-value of propositional belief-reporting sentences, especially when belief conflicts with reality. This article investigates whether linguistic cues, verb factivity in particular, can facilitate children’s understanding of belief-reporting sentences. Two experiments were implemented, one testing children’s knowledge of verb factivity using a gold medal task, and one investigating children’s interpretation of belief-reporting sentences using a truth-value-judgment task. Both experiments took advantage of the contrast between neutral non-factive mental verbs and strong negatively biased mental verbs. What sets the two apart is that the complement clause following a strong negatively biased mental verb is definitely false, whereas the one following a neutral non-factive mental verb remains indeterminate in the absence of additional information. The findings were that, first, 4-year-old children were able to tell the difference between the two types of mental verbs in factivity, and second, children’s performance was significantly improved when a strong negatively biased mental verb than when a neutral non-factive mental verb was used as the main verb of the belief-reporting sentences. The findings suggest that the use of strong negatively biased mental verbs facilitates children’s understanding of belief-reporting sentences. Implications of the findings are discussed in relation to the underlying mechanisms connecting verb factivity and false-belief understanding.

scholarly journals Difficulties in Comprehending Affirmative and Negative Sentences: Evidence From Chinese Children With Reading Difficulties

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shenai Hu ◽  
Maria Vender ◽  
Gaetano Fiorin ◽  
Denis Delfitto
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Reading Difficulties ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Experimental Results ◽  
Chinese Children ◽  
Behavioral Data ◽  
Poor Readers ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
General Validity ◽  
Truth Value

Recent experimental results suggest that negation is particularly challenging for children with reading difficulties. This study looks at how young poor readers, speakers of Mandarin Chinese, comprehend affirmative and negative sentences as compared with a group of age-matched typical readers. Forty-four Chinese children were tested with a truth value judgment task. The results reveal that negative sentences were harder to process than affirmative ones, irrespective of the distinction between poor and typical readers. Moreover, poor readers performed worse than typical readers in comprehending sentences, regardless of whether they were affirmative or negative sentences. We interpret the results as (a) confirming the two-step simulation hypothesis, based on the result that the difficulty in processing negation has a general validity (persisting in pragmatically felicitous contexts), and (b) disconfirming that negation, as far as behavioral data are concerned, can be used as a reliable linguistic predictor of reading difficulties.

scholarly journals When “one” can be “two”: Cross-linguistic differences affect children’s interpretation of the numeral one

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-313
Author(s):  
Sarah Dolscheid ◽  
Franziska Schleussinger ◽  
Martina Penke
Keyword(s):  
Judgment Task ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
Linguistic Differences ◽  
Linguistic Difference ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

In English, a lexical distinction is drawn between the indefinite determiner “a” and the numeral “one”. English-speaking children also interpret the two terms differently, with an exact, upper bounded interpretation of the numeral “one”, but no upper bounded interpretation of the indefinite determiner “a”. Unlike English, however, German does not draw a distinction between the indefinite determiner and the numeral one but instead uses the same term “ein/e” to express both functions. To find out whether this cross-linguistic difference affects children’s upper bounded interpretation of “ein/e”, we tested German-speaking children and adults in a truth-value-judgment task and compared their performance to English-speaking children. Our results revealed that German-speaking children differed from both English children and German adults. Whereas the majority of German adults interpreted “ein/e” in an upper bounded way (i.e. as exactly one, not two), the majority of German-speaking children favored a non-upper bounded interpretation (thus accepting two as a valid response to “ein/e”). German-speaking children’s proportion of upper bounded responses to “ein/e” was also significantly lower than English children’s upper bounded responses to “one”. However, German children’s rate of upper bounded responses increased once a number-biasing context was provided. These findings suggest that German-speaking children can interpret “ein/e” in an upper bounded way but that they need additional cues in order to do so. When no such cues are present, German-speaking children differ from both German-speaking adults and from their English-speaking peers, demonstrating that cross-linguistic differences can affect the way speakers interpret numbers.

scholarly journals Plurality inferences are scalar implicatures: Evidence from acquisition

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyn Tieu ◽  
Cory Bill ◽  
Jacopo Romoli ◽  
Stephen Crain
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Title Page ◽  
Scalar Implicature ◽  
Scalar Implicatures ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
Downward Entailing ◽  
Truth Value

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>This paper provides novel experimental evidence for a scalar implicature approach to the plurality inferences that are associated with English plural morphology (</span><span>Emily fed giraffes </span><span>-&gt; </span><span>Emily fed more than one giraffe</span><span>). Using a Truth Value Judgment Task, we show that both adults and 4–5-year-old children compute more plurality inferences in upward-entailing than downward-entailing environments, but children compute fewer plurality inferences overall than adults do. These findings are consistent with previous research demonstrating children’s relative insensitivity to scalar implicatures. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of plurality inferences, and for the acquisition of scalar inferences more generally. </span></p></div></div></div>

Coherent discourse solves the pronoun interpretation problem

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
JENNIFER SPENADER ◽  
ERIK-JAN SMITS ◽  
PETRA HENDRIKS
Keyword(s):  
Target Sentence ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Production Task ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
Age Range ◽  
Dutch Children ◽  
Interpretation Problem ◽  
Object Pronouns

ABSTRACTMany comprehension studies have shown that children as late as age 6 ; 6 misinterpret object pronouns as co-referring with the referential subject about half the time. A recent review of earlier experiments testing children's interpretation of object pronouns in sentences with quantified subjects (Elbourne, 2005) also suggests that there is a ‘Pronoun Interpretation Problem’. In contrast, two experiments addressing English children's pronoun production (Bloom, Barss, Nicol & Conway, 1994; de Villiers, Cahillane & Altreuter, 2006) show almost perfect usage. The aim of this study is to verify this asymmetry between pronoun production and pronoun comprehension for Dutch, and to investigate the effects of coherent discourse and topicality on pronoun production and comprehension. Employing a truth-value judgment task and an elicited production task, this study indeed finds such an asymmetry in 83 Dutch children (age range 4 ; 5–6 ; 6). When object pronouns were clearly established as the topic of the target sentence, the Pronoun Interpretation Problem dissolved entirely. These results are compatible with the asymmetrical grammar hypothesis of Hendriks & Spenader (2005/2006) and suggest, contrary to many previous claims, that children are highly proficient at using pragmatic clues in interpretation.

Children's interpretation of disjunction in the scope of ‘before’: a comparison of English and Mandarin

2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 482-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA NOTLEY ◽  
PENG ZHOU ◽  
BRITTA JENSEN ◽  
STEPHEN CRAIN
Keyword(s):  
Classical Logic ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Finish Line ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
Truth Value

ABSTRACTThis study investigates three- to five-year-old children's interpretation of disjunction in sentences like ‘The dog reached the finish line before the turtle or the bunny’. English disjunction has a conjunctive interpretation in such sentences (‘The dog reached the finish line before the turtle and before the bunny’). This interpretation conforms with classical logic. Mandarin disjunction (‘huozhe’) can take scope over ‘before’ (‘zai … zhiqian’), so the same sentence can mean ‘The dog reached the finish line before the turtle or before the bunny (I don't know which)’. If children are guided by adult input in the acquisition of sentence meanings, English- and Mandarin-speaking children should assign different interpretations to such sentences. If children are guided by logical principles, then children acquiring either language should initially assign the conjunctive interpretation of disjunction. A truth-value judgment task was used to test this prediction and English- and Mandarin-speaking children were found to behave similarly.

scholarly journals The semantics and pragmatics of belief reports in preschoolers

2012 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shevaun Lewis, Jeffrey Lidz, Valentine Hacquard
Keyword(s):  
Judgment Task ◽  
Semantic Representations ◽  
Font Size ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
Belief Reports ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
Representations Of Belief

<p class="p1"><span style="font-size: 10px;">Children under 4 years have been claimed to lack adult-like semantic representations of belief verbs like ‘think’. Based on two experiments involving a truth-value judgment task, we argue that 4-year olds’ apparently deviant interpretations arise from pragmatic difficulty understanding the </span><em style="font-size: 10px;">relevance </em><span style="font-size: 10px;">of belief, rather than from conceptual or semantic immaturity. </span></p>

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