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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2016
Edited by Jenny Audring and Sander Lestrade
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 33] 2016
► pp. 28–40

Complex language, complex thought?

The relation between children’s production of double embeddings and Theory of Mind

| Utrecht University
| University of Groningen

It has been argued (e.g., by De Villiers and colleagues) that the acquisition of sentence embedding is necessary for the development of first-order Theory of Mind (ToM): the ability to attribute beliefs to others. This raises the question whether the acquisition of double embedded sentences is related to, and perhaps even necessary for, the development of second-order ToM: the ability to attribute beliefs about beliefs to others. This study tested 55 children (aged 7-10) on their ToM understanding in a false-belief task and on their elicited production of sentence embeddings. We found that second-order ToM passers produced mainly double embeddings, whereas first-order ToM passers produced mainly single embeddings. Furthermore, a better performance on second-order ToM predicted a higher rate of double embeddings and a lower rate of single embeddings in the production task. We conclude that children’s ability to produce double embeddings is related to their development of second-order ToM.

Keywords: Language acquisition, false-belief task, sentence embedding, Theory of Mind
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Materials and design
    • 2.3Procedure
    • 2.4Data analysis of the Sentence Embedding task
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1False-belief reasoning
    • 3.2Production of double embeddings
    • 3.3Regression analysis
  • 4.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 21 December 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.33.03bog
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