Linguistic Determinism and the Understanding of False Beliefs

We intend in this chapter to put forward a radical proposition about the relationship between language and the understanding of false beliefs. We begin by contrasting the roles that language acquisition might play with respect to the development of theory of mind reasoning, separating out the language-for-the-task from the social constructivist view of language as one of several facilitators of social cognition, and both of these from the strongest position that certain linguistic structures make available a representational format for false beliefs. We then present empirical data from a longitudinal study of normally developing preschool children and from our work with language-delayed oral deaf children, to test among the rival hypotheses for the role of language in the development of false belief reasoning. The empirical data make a suprisingly coherent story, though many pieces remain to be worked into the puzzle. The empirical story is at least suggestive enough that it forces us to examine the strongest theoretical position seriously, and ask, is it viable

Finding Signatures of Linguistic Reasoning

Hinzen lays out the platform of un-Cartesian linguistics, and the ramifications threaten widespread beliefs about the relations between language and thought. The theoretical story is compelling but my commentary will address my concerns as a laborer in research

Unbiased Language Assessment: Contributions of Linguistic Theory

This review addresses several situations of language learning to make concrete the issue of fairness—and justice—that arises in designing assessments. First, I discuss the implications of dialect variation in American English, asking how assessment has taken dialect into consideration. Second, I address the question of how to assess the distributed knowledge of bilingual or dual-language learners. The evaluation of the language skills of children growing up in poverty asks whether the current focus on the quantity of caregiver input is misplaced. Third, I address a special case in which the young speakers of a minority language, Romani, are judged to be unfit for schooling because they fail tests in the state language. Finally, I examine the difficult issue of language assessments in countries with multiple official languages and few resources. In each of these areas, the involvement and expertise of linguists are essential for knowing how the grammar works and what might be important to assess

The emergence of bound variable structures

Even for aduelts, quantifiers such as all , some , every seem to involve difficult mapping between logic and grammar. A sentence like every boy ate every food requires a little concentration before the meaning comes through. One might think that there is no natural mapping of such sophisticated aspectes of cognition onto grammatical structure. Current linguistic theory, however, reveals that syntax puts sharp limits on how quantification works. The study of quantifiers might reveal how cognition connects to grammar and how they are intertwined int he process of acquisition. We will try to present the acquisition problem in a manner slightly abstracted from the technical details of linguistic theory

Does every child produce every correctly?

In this paper, we examine the classic phenomena associated with children\u27s interpretation of every and present an experimental study that looks at production and comprehension in the same children. Children in the age range five through seven years apparently do not have full competence in producing sentences containing every. Their mistakes in comprehension carry over to their production. Although these data are insufficient to decide among the three accounts examined, we hope to have inspired researchers to include production data in their models of how children learn every and other quantifiers

Questions after stories: Supplying context and removing it as a variable.

In the philosophy of science considerable attention has been paid to the question of how to be sure that a given experimental result can be taken as supporting evidence for a theory. How do we escape from this dilemma in our linguistic research? How can we know that a certain set of results is evidence on behalf of a theory and not due to the auxiliary assumptions required for the test? We have tried to do acquisition studies on aspects of reasonably refined linguistic theories, so that there are other kinds of evidence already articulated in their defense. In our experiments, the auxiliary assumptions are held constant across two conditions that elicit different responses, so the minimal difference between the two conditions must be held responsible for the responses. If the auxiliary assumptions are appealed to as explanation for one phenomenon, they can be shown to make precisely the wrong predictions for a second phenomenon within the same experiment

Assessing What Every 5-Year-Old Should Know

In this session we\u27re going to talk about assessing language skills in 5-year-olds, bascially assessing language skills in 4 to 8 year olds as it turns out, simply to introduce you to the area. This is part of a substantive project involving collaboration between Harry Seymour and Tom Roeper at UMass and Jill de Villiers and Peter de Villiers at Smith College. It is funded by the National Institutes of Health, trying to develop a comprehensive test of language functioning in children between ages of 4 and about 8 to 10, and in particular, trying to develop a test that is dialect neutral