From False Belief to False Ascription

A growing body of literature has investigated whether the ability to contend with false belief (Wimmer and Perner 1983) is dependent upon the acquisition of the language that reports false beliefs (de Villiers, 2000, 2004, de Villiers and de Villiers 2000, de Villiers and Roeper (in prep)). de Villiers and her colleagues maintain that certain linguistic developments are precursors to a child’s Theory of Mind. In particular, the linguistic representation of clausal complementation necessary for representing (false) beliefs has not developed in those children who fail standard false belief tasks (de Villiers and Pyers 2002). Consider the scenario depicted in Fig. 1, where Big Bird (BB) believes that Cookie Monster (CM) is climbing the stairs, when in actuality Cookie Monster is eating a cookie. Now consider the sentence below in (1), an attitude ascription that reports Big Birds beliefs.