Description
TitleAcquiring a word through the speaker's false-belief
Date Created2021
Other Date2021-01 (degree)
Extent1 online resource (xi, 97 pages) : illustrations
DescriptionThis work bridges two major areas of the cognitive development research–Theory of Mind (ToM) development and word learning. Specifically, I test the idea that ToM is a necessary factor in early word acquisition process, as it helps young learners form a hypothesis about what the most likely referent of a novel label might be.
The idea that ToM is an important factor that young children use to select a candidate referent of a novel label is largely inspired by social approaches to word learning and word meaning (e.g. Baldwin, 1991; Cartmill et al., 2013; Grice, 1969). Critically, we postulate that the nature of early ToM that underlies this process is meta-representational, i.e. it allows for representing genuine propositional attitudes such as beliefs (e.g. Leslie, 1987). We call this developmental continuity hypothesis. An opposing view (dual-systems hypothesis) postulates that ToM lacks the meta-representational structure prior to the age of four, hence it cannot adequately account for various cases that require flexible mental states reasoning, such as reasoning about identity false-beliefs (e.g. Butterfill & Apperly, 2013). Here, we test these opposing hypotheses by asking whether young children (prior to the age of four) would succeed on a task that required them to map a label onto its referent by correcting for the speaker’s identity false-belief. If children could attribute these types of beliefs prior to the age of four and, moreover, use them to learn words this would provide a compelling support in favor of developmental continuity of metarepresentational ToM.
To test these hypotheses, I developed a new naming false-belief task, which requires subjects to point to the correct referent of a novel label (a proper name or a common noun), where the only way to infer who the referent is, is through an agent’s identity false-belief. I conducted a set of experiments with young 3-year-olds and 2.5-year olds, where I employ this method to show that at least by the age of 3, children are capable of mapping a label and its referent by correcting for the speaker’s identity false-belief. This provides compelling evidence in support of developmental continuity of metarepresentational ToM. Moreover, it demonstrates that young word learners attend to the speaker’s epistemic states to narrow down the space of a word’s possible meanings, which suggests strong mentalism of the word learning process.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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