The present study investigated the universality of the early development of young children's understanding and representation of false beliefs, and specifically, the effect of language on Chinese-speaking children's performance in false belief tasks under three between-subjects conditions. The three conditions differed only in the belief verb that was used in probe questions regarding one's own or another person's beliefs, namely the Chinese verbs, xiang, yiwei, and dang. While the three words are all appropriate to false beliefs, they have different connotations regarding the likelihood of a belief being false, with xiang being more neutral than either yiwei or dang. Experiment i involved thirty-five Chinese-speaking adults who responded to false belief tasks to be used in Experiment 2 in order both to establish an adult comparison and to obtain empirical evidence regarding how Chinese-speaking adults use the three belief verbs to describe different false belief situations. In Experiment 2, 188 three-, four-, and five-year-old Chinese-speaking children participated in three false belief tasks. They were asked to report about an individual's false belief when either xiang, yiwei, or dang was used in the probe question. Results revealed a rapid developmental pattern in Chinese-speaking children's understanding of false belief, which is similar to that found with Western children. In addition, children performed significantly better when yiwei and dang, which connote that the belief referred to may be false, were used in belief questions than when xiang, the more neutral verb, was used. This finding suggests an important role of language in assessing children's understanding of belief and false belief.

Our research interests over the past decade have focussed on the nature and consequences of literacy. In pursuit of these interests, we have advanced a theory of the relationship between the development of literacy and oral language competence, a theory which takes literacy as involving not only the ability to read and write but also a particular orientation to language, mind, and the world. Our effort has been to contribute to a general theory of the nature and consequences of literacy which would throw new light on the problems of learning to read and write. Our guiding assumption was that reading and writing are not simply skills which children acquire. Rather, learning to read and write are aspects of coming to live in and to understand and participate in a literate society, a literate society being distinguished by, at least, the following four properties: a tradition of writing and accumulating texts; the development of institutions for using texts; an evolved metalanguage for interpreting and otherwise orally talking about written texts; and institutions, primarily schools, for the induction of children into this literate society.Many writers have attempted to characterize these distinctive properties of a literate society, including such scholars as Havelock, McLuhan, Goody and Watt, and Ong. Our stance, based on the work of these writers, has been to look for evidence that a central dimension of literacy is the development of a particular attitude toward language, the treatment of language as an object, or, in other words, the treatment of text as an autonomous representation of meaning. What children 136Interchange 18/1-2 © The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education 1987

2001). Young children and the say/mean distinction: verbatim and paraphrase recognition in narrative and nursery rhyme contexts.

No abstract

No abstract