Baratgin Jean, Dubois-Sage Marion, Jacquet Baptiste, Stilgenbauer Jean-Louis, Jamet Frank
Laboratoire Cognition Humaine et Artificielle, Université Paris 8, Paris, France.
Probability, Assessment, Reasoning and Inferences Studies (P-A-R-I-S) Association, Paris, France.
Front Psychol. 2020 Nov 23;11:593807. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.593807. eCollection 2020.
The poor performances of typically developing children younger than 4 in the first-order false-belief task "Maxi and the chocolate" is analyzed from the perspective of conversational pragmatics. An ambiguous question asked by an adult experimenter (perceived as a teacher) can receive different interpretations based on a search for relevance, by which children according to their age attribute different intentions to the questioner, within the limits of their own meta-cognitive knowledge. The adult experimenter tells the child the following story of object-transfer: "Maxi puts his chocolate into the green cupboard before going out to play. In his absence, his mother moves the chocolate from the green cupboard to the blue one." The child must then predict where Maxi will pick up the chocolate when he returns. To the child, the question from an adult (a knowledgeable person) may seem surprising and can be understood as a question of his own knowledge of the world, rather than on Maxi's mental representations. In our study, without any modification of the initial task, we disambiguate the context of the question by (1) replacing the adult experimenter with a humanoid robot presented as "ignorant" and "slow" but trying to learn and (2) placing the child in the role of a "mentor" (the knowledgeable person). Sixty-two typical children of 3 years-old completed the first-order false belief task "Maxi and the chocolate," either with a human or with a robot. Results revealed a significantly higher success rate in the robot condition than in the human condition. Thus, young children seem to fail because of the pragmatic difficulty of the first-order task, which causes a difference of interpretation between the young child and the experimenter.
从会话语用学的角度分析了4岁以下正常发育儿童在一阶错误信念任务“马克西与巧克力”中的不佳表现。成年实验者（被视为教师）提出的一个模棱两可的问题，基于对相关性的探寻，可能会有不同的解释，根据年龄不同，儿童会在自身元认知知识的范围内，赋予提问者不同的意图。成年实验者给孩子讲述了以下物体转移的故事：“马克西出去玩之前把他的巧克力放进了绿色橱柜里。他不在的时候，他妈妈把巧克力从绿色橱柜移到了蓝色橱柜里。”然后孩子必须预测马克西回来时会在哪里拿巧克力。对孩子来说，来自成年人（一个知识渊博的人）的问题可能看起来很奇怪，并且可以被理解为是关于他自己对世界的认知的问题，而不是关于马克西的心理表征。在我们的研究中，在没有对初始任务进行任何修改的情况下，我们通过以下方式消除了问题的背景歧义：（1）将成年实验者换成一个被描述为“无知”和“迟钝”但试图学习的人形机器人；（2）让孩子扮演“导师”（知识渊博的人）的角色。62名3岁的正常儿童完成了一阶错误信念任务“马克西与巧克力”，实验对象要么是真人，要么是机器人。结果显示，机器人条件下的成功率显著高于真人条件下的成功率。因此，幼儿似乎是因为一阶任务的语用困难而失败，这导致了幼儿和实验者之间的解释差异。
