Seventeen-month-olds appeal to false beliefs to interpret others' referential communication

Victoria Southgate, Coralie Chevallier, Gergely Csibra

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)907-912
Number of pages6
JournalDevelopmental Science
Volume13
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 2010

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