3 research outputs found
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Children’s Sentential Complement Use Leads the Theory of Mind Development Period: Evidence from the CHILDES Corpus
Converging evidence suggests that children’s linguistic and
theory of mind (ToM) development are linked. Specifically,
learning the sentential complement grammatical structure has
been shown to play a causal role in the development of some
false belief reasoning skills. Here, we extend this line of work
to examine this relationship in the wild by means of a corpus
analysis of children’s speech during the typical period of ToM
development. We show that children’s use of the sentential
complement grammatical structure increases immediately
preceding the ToM development period and plateaus shortly
thereafter. Furthermore, we find that parents’ child-directed
speech follows a similar pattern
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Bootstrapping from Language in the Analogical Theory of Mind Model
Many psychologists have argued that language acquisition
plays an important role in the development of Theory of Mind
(ToM) reasoning in children. Several accounts of this
interaction exist: some believe that language gives children
the ability to express already formed ToM reasoning (e.g. He,
Bolz, & Baillargeon, 2011), while others argue that learning
specific grammatical structures engenders new reasoning
abilities (e.g. de Villiers & Pyers, 1997). Questions remain
about the mechanism by which this interaction occurs. In this
paper, we show that the Analogical Theory of Mind (AToM;
Rabkina et al., 2017) computational model can bootstrap
aspects of ToM reasoning from sentential complement
training, and that its performance matches improvement
patterns of children who are trained using similar stimuli.
This provides an implemented algorithmic account of
bootstrapping ToM reasoning from language within a broader
model of ToM development