Early Social Cognition: Alternatives to Implicit Mindreading

According to the BD-model of mindreading, we primarily understand others in terms of beliefs and desires. In this article we review a number of objections against explicit versions of the BD-model, and discuss the prospects of using its implicit counterpart as an explanatory model of early emerging socio-cognitive abilities. Focusing on recent findings on so-called ‘implicit’ false belief understanding, we put forward a number of considerations against the adoption of an implicit BD-model. Finally, we explore a different way to make sense of implicit false belief understanding in terms of keeping track of affordances

From reading minds to social interaction: respecifying Theory of Mind

The aim of this paper is to show some of the limitations of the Theory of Mind approach to interaction compared to a conversation analytic alternative. In the former, mental state terms are examined as words that signify internal referents. This study examines children’s uses of ‘I want’ in situ. The data are taken from a corpus of family mealtimes. ‘I want’ constructions are shown to be interactionally occasioned. The analysis suggests that (a) a referential view of language does not adequately account for how mental state terms are used in talk, (b) the dominant methodology for examining children’s understanding of ‘desires’ is based on several problematic assumptions. It is concluded that participation in interaction is a social matter, a consideration that is obscured by Theory of Mind and its favoured methods

Semantic Knowledge, Domains of Meaning and Conceptual Spaces

The main thesis of this chapter is that children do not learn single new words but rather new words that belong to the same domain. For example, once they learn a word for a color, other color words will be learned soon after. The chapter presents a model of such domain-oriented language learning. Conceptual spaces are used as a framework for modeling the semantic processes involved in language acquisition. The author illustrates the model with some of the semantic domains that a child acquires during the first formative years of life. Linguistic data is also presented in support of the hypothesis that semantics knowledge is organized into domains