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The development of mental terms: pragmatics or semantics?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Chris Moore  and
Jane Davidge
Chris Moore*
Affiliation:
Mount Saint Vincent University
Jane Davidge
Affiliation:
Mount Saint Vincent University
*
Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4J1, Canada.
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Abstract

The distinctions between the mental terms, know, think and sure was examined in an experiment with 60 children between three and six years of age. The children were required to find an object hidden in one of two places. Their only clues were two statements involving contrasting mental terms, with each statement referring to one of the possible hiding places. Results showed a significant improvement with age for the know-think and sure-think contrasts, with think treated as a less reliable index of location than both know and sure by four to five years of age. No change with age was found for know-sure contrast. It is concluded that by four to five years of age, children recognize the function of mental terms to express degrees of certainty, and that this understanding is probably not based on the factive properties of the terms.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , October 1989 , pp. 633 - 641
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported by Grant no. 410-87-1315 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The authors would like to express their gratitude to the staff and children of Children's Choice Nursery school, Burnside Children's Centre, and Hawthorn Elementary school, Dartmouth. Thanks also to Tom Barrett for assistance with the analysis.

References

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