Ronderos Camilo R, Iversen Rebecca, Noveck Ira, Falkum Ingrid
Center for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Lund, Sweden.
Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2025 Aug 14;380(1932):20230493. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2023.0493.
Work in developmental pragmatics has shown that even though infants display refined mindreading abilities, older children struggle to understand language phenomena that rely on mindreading. This apparent mismatch might be partially explained by considering children's growing sensitivity to social categories such as their interlocutor's age. Based on recent work in philosophy of mind, we investigated how social categorization relates to children's developing mindreading abilities during language comprehension. We tested the hypothesis that social-category-based reasoning follows a similar developmental trajectory to that typically described for children's mindreading skills. In a picture-selection task, Norwegian participants (ages 3-9 years, = 119) made decisions regarding a speaker's (child or adult) preferences by choosing between images showing stereotypically child-coded and adult-coded items. Young children preferentially selected the child-coded image regardless of the speaker's age, while older children selected the stereotypically adult-coded image when they heard the adult speaker. Additionally, we found no evidence that participants' performance in the picture-selection task was causally predicted by their scores on a standard false-belief task. We interpret these results as suggesting that the use of social categorization skills during utterance interpretation describes a similar developmental trajectory to that typically described for mindreading abilities, but is likely independent from false-belief reasoning. We argue that future studies in developmental pragmatics should consider social category differences between participants and speakers when drawing conclusions about children's mindreading abilities and how these are reflected in their interpretation of verbal utterances.This article is part of the theme issue 'At the heart of human communication: new views on the complex relationship between pragmatics and Theory of Mind'.
发展语用学的研究表明，尽管婴儿表现出精细的读心能力，但年龄较大的儿童在理解依赖读心的语言现象时仍存在困难。这种明显的不匹配现象，部分原因可能是儿童对社会类别（如对话者的年龄）的敏感度不断提高。基于近期心灵哲学的研究成果，我们探究了在语言理解过程中，社会分类与儿童发展中的读心能力之间的关系。我们检验了这样一个假设：基于社会类别的推理与儿童读心技能通常所描述的发展轨迹相似。在一项图片选择任务中，挪威参与者（年龄在3至9岁之间，N = 119）通过在展示典型儿童编码和成人编码物品的图片之间进行选择，来判断说话者（儿童或成人）的偏好。幼儿无论说话者的年龄如何，都优先选择儿童编码的图片，而年龄较大的儿童在听到成人说话者时，会选择典型的成人编码图片。此外，我们没有发现证据表明参与者在图片选择任务中的表现会由他们在标准错误信念任务中的得分因果性地预测出来。我们将这些结果解释为，在话语理解过程中使用社会分类技能所描述的发展轨迹，与通常所描述的读心能力的发展轨迹相似，但可能独立于错误信念推理。我们认为，未来发展语用学的研究在就儿童的读心能力及其在言语理解中的体现得出结论时，应考虑参与者和说话者之间的社会类别差异。本文是主题为“人类交流的核心：语用学与心理理论之间复杂关系的新观点”这一特刊的一部分。
