The social dimension of mindreading: developmental evidence for the role of social categorization during utterance interpretation

TL;DR

This study explores how children use social categories like age to interpret language, finding that this ability develops similarly to mindreading but independently of false-belief understanding.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new perspective on developmental pragmatics by linking social categorization to mindreading during language interpretation.

Findings

Young children (3–9 years) prefer child-coded images regardless of the speaker's age.

Older children select adult-coded images when the speaker is an adult.

Performance in the task is not predicted by false-belief task scores.

Abstract

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, N = 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’.

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