Mindreading and Verbal Communication

In this paper, I illustrate how children’s mentalizing abilities interface with both implicit and explicit aspects of communication. I use two examples to make this point. First, I argue that some understanding that other people have mental states which can be affected by communication is present already in infancy. I show that this early sensitivity to intentionality is responsible for early communicative successes. Second, I suggest that mindreading is involved in learning the meaning of evidentials and other mental terms. I present some cross-linguistic evidence for the acquisition of evidential morphemes and relate those findings to young children’s ability to reason about beliefs, evidence and information. The idea that verbal communication involves a species of mindreading is not new. Among linguists and philosophers, largely as a result of Grice’s (1957, 1967) influence, it has long been recognized that the act of communicating involves on the part of the communicator and the addressee mutual metarepresentations of each others’ mental states. In psychology, the coordination of common ground and attention in conversation has been pursued in a variety of studies (e.g. Clark and Marshall, 1981; Bruner, 1983). A number of recent developments, however, have opened up the possibility of looking in new ways at the connections between linguistic communication and mentalizing. Within linguistic pragmatics, advances in the theory of communication have allowed for a more explicit and psychologically natural role for mindreading than Grice’s original insights (see Sperber and Wilson, this volume; cf. Sperber and Wilson, 1986; Sperber, 2000; Wilson, 2000). Within cognitive psychology, a series of important experimental findings have greatly enhanced our understanding of the nature, development and breakdown of mindreading abilities; many of these results directly address the way mindreading mechanisms impact on verbal interaction in both children and adults (see Bloom, this volume; also Bloom, 2000). In this paper, I want to use insights from both these strands of research to discuss how the ability to metarepresent mental states is involved in the development of communicative skills. My goal is to show that such an interdisciplinI wish to thank Paul Bloom, Robyn Carston, Lila Gleitman, Dan Sperber, the two M&L referees, the Workshop participants and especially Deirdre Wilson for comments and discussion. Address for correspondence: IRCS, University of Pennsylvania, 3401 Walnut Street, Suite 400A, Philadelphia PA 19104, USA. Email: anna4 linc.cis.upenn.edu. Mind & Language, Vol. 17 Nos 1 and 2 February/April 2002, pp. 55–67.  Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.