Easy or Not Easy: Young Children’s False Belief Understanding in Communicative Situations

The present study investigated whether young children are better at representing others’ false beliefs in communicative situations than in standard false belief tasks. Younger (3.7–4.6 year-olds, n = 18), middle-aged (4.7–5.6 year-olds, n = 20), and older children (5.7–6.6 year-olds, n = 20) completed both standard false belief and communicative tasks having the same story structure. Although the children gave fewer correct answers in the communicative tasks, they expressed more uncertainty toward their choices in the communicative tasks than in the standard tasks. The results appear to indicate that children belonging to the younger group are more sensitive to others’ knowledge states in communicative settings than in hypothetical situations. The results also demonstrate the difficulty in inhibiting the literal meaning of utterances for children..