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Doherty, Martin 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4314-7892 and Perner, Josef
(1998)
Metalinguistic awareness and theory of mind: Just two words for the same thing?
Cognitive Development, 13 (3).
pp. 279-305.
ISSN 0885-2014
Abstract
Three- to 5-year-old children were tested on a traditional False Belief task, in which children have to predict where a protagonist will look for an unexpectedly moved object, and a new metalinguistic task. In this task children named an item (e.g., "rabbit") and they had to monitor that another person used a synonym for naming the same item (e.g., "bunny"). Both tasks were mastered about the age of 4 years with a strong correlation between the two tasks that remained above .70 even after partialling out control measures and verbal intelligence. Moreover, younger children's difficulties with the metalinguistic task did not extend to a control task of equivalent logical structure and complexity. A simplified version of the task in which children had to produce synonyms themselves yielded very similar results. The findings confirm that metalinguistic awareness can be demonstrated around 4 years and they support the theory that the ability to understand belief relates to the development of understanding representations.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology |
| UEA Research Groups: | Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > UEA Experimental Philosophy Group Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Developmental Science |
| Related URLs: | |
| Depositing User: | Pure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 29 Oct 2015 12:01 |
| Last Modified: | 17 Jun 2024 12:30 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/54886 |
| DOI: | 10.1016/S0885-2014(98)90012-0 |
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