How do children overcome their pragmatic performance problems in the true belief task? The role of advanced pragmatics and higher-order theory of mind

Abstract

The true belief (TB) control condition of the classical location-change task asks children to ascribe a veridical belief to an agent to predict her action (analog to the false belief (FB) condition to test Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities). Studies that administered TB tasks to a broad age range of children yielded surprising findings of a U-shaped performance curve in this seemingly trivial task. Children before age four perform competently in the TB condition. Children who begin to solve the FB condition at age four, however, fail the TB condition and only from around age 10, children succeed again. New evidence suggests that the decline in performance around age four reflects pragmatic confusions caused by the triviality of the task rather than real competence deficits in ToM. Based on these results, it can be hypothesized that the recovery of performance at the end of the U-shaped curve reflects underlying developments in children’s growing pragmatic awareness. The aim of the current set of studies, therefore, was to test whether the developmental change at the end of the U-shaped performance curve can be explained by changes in children’s pragmatic understanding and by more general underlying developmental changes in recursive ToM or recursive thinking in general. Results from Study 1 (N = 81, 6–10 years) suggest that children’s recursive ToM, but not their advanced pragmatic understanding or general recursive thinking abilities predict their TB performance. However, this relationship could not be replicated in Study 2 (N = 87, 6–10 years) and Study 3 (N = 64, 6–10 years) in which neither recursive ToM nor advanced pragmatic understanding or recursive thinking explained children’s performance in the TB task. The studies therefore remain inconclusive regarding explanations for the end of the U-shaped performance curve. Future research needs to investigate potential pragmatic and general cognitive foundations of this developmental change more thoroughly.

Exploring Pragmatic Development in 4-Year-Old Children: An Interactionalist Perspective

“…knowledge is essential to understanding and applying language usage standards based on variables including the target audience, communication objectives, and social conventions within the language community (Puri & Baskara, 2023). The acquisition of pragmatic knowledge is contingent upon learners' capacity to use their grammatical and structural knowledge in context-appropriate real-world discussions, as noted by Al-Obaydi (2023), Marasabessy et al (2023), and Schidelko (2022). This compilation of research provides a nuanced look into the realm of pragmatic language development in children, touching upon various factors, disorders, and bilingualism's effects.…”

Why do children from age four fail true belief tasks? A decision experiment testing competence versus performance limitation accounts

“…On the other side, the pragmatic performance limitation account claims that children from age four do have solid meta-representational ToM competence; but pragmatic (and potentially other) performance factors may mask this competence in many TB tasks (Oktay-Gür & Rakoczy, 2017;Rakoczy & Oktay-Gür, 2020;Schidelko, Huemer, et al, 2022;Schidelko, Proft, et al, 2022). Crucial performance factors pertain to confusing task pragmatics: TB tasks involve trivial, academic test questions about agents' subjective perspective in situations in which such discourse seems to lack its typical point (there is not even the possibility of mis-representation, error etc.…”

“…Children now consistently predict that the protagonist -despite the fact that she observed the location change -will look for her object in the first location. Only from around age eight to ten they recover from the failure, come to solve the TB task again and thus consistently master both FB and TB tasks (Fabricius et al, 2010(Fabricius et al, , 2021Friedman et al, 2003;Hedger & Fabricius, 2011;Huemer et al, 2023;Oktay-Gür & Rakoczy, 2017;Rakoczy & Oktay-Gür, 2020;Schidelko, Proft, et al, 2022).…”

“…1.1.2. Performance limitation accounts: TB failure merely reflects confusing task pragmatics An alternative view, however, is that the TB failure of children age four to six does not reflect competence limitations, but merely performance problems: Children this age do operate with full-fledged meta-representational ToM, but fail TB tasks due to pragmatic performance factors (Oktay-Gür & Rakoczy, 2017;Rakoczy & Oktay-Gür, 2020;Schidelko, Huemer, et al, 2022;Schidelko, Proft, et al, 2022). Pragmatic performance limitation accounts have long been discussed in the context of interpreting various ToM tasks (e.g., Helming et al, 2014Helming et al, , 2016Siegal & Beattie, 1991;Surian & Leslie, 1999;Westra, 2017).…”