We address the puzzle about early belief ascription: young children fail elicited-response false-belief tasks, but they demonstrate spontaneous false-belief understanding. Based on recent converging evidence, we articulate a pragmatic framework to solve this puzzle. Young children do understand the contents of others' false belief, but they are overwhelmed when they must simultaneously make sen...

A total of 104 children aged between 41 and 47 months were selected to study the relationship between language and false belief understanding. Participants were assigned to four different training conditions: discourse, labelling, control (all with deceptive objects), and sentential complements (involving non-deceptive objects). Post-test results showed an improvement in children's false belief...

Recent advancements in the field of infant false-belief reasoning have brought into question whether performance on implicit and explicit measures of false belief is driven by the same level of representational understanding. The success of infants on implicit measures has also raised doubt over the role that language development plays in the development of false-belief reasoning. In the curren...

In our article we explore the developmental paradox of false belief understanding. This paradox follows from the claim that young infants already have an ‘implicit’ notion of false belief, despite the fact that they consistently fail tests assessing ‘explicit’ forms of false belief understanding. First, we argue that recent dual-system proposals to solve this paradox are unsatisfactory because ...

To investigate the contributions of language and education to Theory of Mind understanding, three Nicaraguan groups were tested using a minimally verbal protocol in which they themselves experienced a false belief instead of being told of one. We also assessed the relationship of executive function abilities to false belief performance. Homesigners, who have no linguistic community, did not suc...

This study examined the influence of younger siblings on children's understanding of second-order false belief. In a representative community sample of firstborn children (N=229) with a mean age of 7years (SD=4.58), false belief was assessed during a home visit using an adaptation of a well-established second-order false belief narrative enacted with Playmobil figures. Children's responses were...

Reports that infants in the second year of life can attribute false beliefs to others have all used a search paradigm in which an agent with a false belief about an object's location searches for the object. The present research asked whether 18-month-olds would still demonstrate false-belief understanding when tested with a novel non-search paradigm. An experimenter shook an object, demonstrat...