A growing body of work in child language acquisition and psychology suggests that children differ from adults in their understanding of the thoughts and beliefs of others, that is, they are said to “lack Theory of Mind” before around the age of four years.(Wellman, Cross and Watson (2001)) Do children undergo a conceptual change at this point ( Wellman and some others)? Or  do certain triggering environments and the maturation of supporting processing skills allow children to make use of innate understanding of belief ( Leslie (1991;1994)?  de Villiers and de Villiers(2000) found that the best predictor of when children in English pass “false belief” tasks is the success on a linguistic task involving embedded false complements.  This suggests an interesting correlation between the acquisition of syntactic embedding and the acquisition of an understanding of other minds.  We are conducting a series of experiments on child language acquisition in English and Tibetan to discover the nature of this correlation.

 

The English Experiments    (under construction)

 

The Tibetan Experiments (under construction)