Recursive Complements and Propositional Attitudes

Abstract

The focus of this chapter is in what role syntactic recursion might play in the representation of propositional attitudes. Syntactic complements under mental and communication verbs are recursive, and so also are the propositional attitudes. There is strong evidence that children take some time to master the first order syntactic complementation typical of verbs of communication. When they do acquire these structures, the evidence suggests that this helps children reason about propositional attitudes such as false beliefs. In this chapter we seek to deepen our understanding of the crucial property of sentential and attitude embedding. Is the crucial aspect that the truth value of the complement differs from that of the embedded clause, or is it that both the sentence forms and the propositional attitudes are recursive? We show that new insight can be gained by examining higher order levels of both sentence embedding and propositional attitudes. Based on some empirical data on second order complements and propositional attitude reasoning in children, we propose that truth contrasts between clauses may provide a crucial trigger for recursive complements.

Syntactic Recursion Facilitates and Working Memory Predicts Recursive Theory of Mind

“…Similar to the studies showing that language development contributes to the development of first-order ToM [27,42–47] (but see [48] for evidence of false belief understanding in preverbal infants), a number of studies have shown that language is important in children’s development of second-order ToM.…”

“…A possible sequence of reasoning steps from the child’s perspective might be as follows: i) “John knows that the chocolate is in the toy box”, ii) “Mary does not know this”, iii) “Mary knows that John put the chocolate into the drawer before”, iv) “Mary thinks that John will look for the chocolate in the drawer”. In line with de Villiers et al [27], each reasoning step is in the form of a single-embedded sentence at the surface. In addition to de Villiers et al’s study, the serial processing bottleneck hypothesis allows us to propose a possible explanation for their failures on children’s development of processing these rules to answer the second-order false belief question in terms of working memory.…”

“…The syntactic component of language is found to be related to first-order ToM in terms of its hierarchical embedding structure [27,43,53–55]. Usually, first-order complement clauses, as shown below in Example (1) (adapted from [44]), have been used in the literature to investigate this relationship.…”

“…Usually, first-order complement clauses, as shown below in Example (1) (adapted from [44]), have been used in the literature to investigate this relationship. Complement clauses such as “ that p ” may be used to express propositional attitudes (or opinions) towards some state p in the world [27]. They may be preceded by mental state verbs as in “Mary knows that p” or in “Mary believes that p” or by communication verbs as in “Mary said that p”.…”

“…Recently, de Villiers et al [27] argued that experience with truth-value contrasts in contexts with full tensed complement clauses such as Example (1) opens the door for children to pass first-order ToM tasks and to recognize syntactic recursion. Subsequently, understanding sentence recursion allows children to pass recursive ToM tasks.…”