Acquisition and use of mental verbs by Dutch children
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2020-01-20
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en
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Various studies into the theory of mind of young children suggest that there is a universal developmental pattern. Under experimental conditions, children can demonstrate understanding of desire before belief, and in several natural language studies it has been shown that they produce desire verbs at a younger age than belief verbs. It has been argued that this pattern is due to universal cognitive development. In this thesis, I study the mental state language of Dutch children aged 1;0-3;9, using three longitudinal corpora. Consistent with earlier natural language research, Dutch children refer to mental states of desire before referring to states of belief. However, there also are differences with the English data and within the three Dutch corpora used. These differences suggest that language-specific features and the pragmatic context of conversation can influence early mental state language.
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