Modelación tipo Gurson

Does language facilitate young children’s acquisition of a mental-state understanding and do the grammatically embedded expressions play a role in helping children to acquire these skills earlier than would be expected from data collected in other language groups? In order to answer the central questions, Chapters Two and Three reported two experiments conducted with Korean children between three and five years of age. First, it appears that Korean children’s understanding of a mind was achieved at the age of five, if we can take false belief as a maker of such understanding (Wellman et al., 2001). Consequently, the role of the specific linguistic markers for un/certainty was observed in 3- and 4-year-olds. The most important finding was that the preschoolers’ performance was influenced by the linguistic markers (i.e., certainty and uncertainty) used in the test questions and these appeared to be the same in the two younger age groups apart from the 5-year-olds as the oldest group children showed an understanding of a mind. It is apparent that the strength of certainty was a critical factor in facilitating performance on social understanding rather than the exposure of mental-state language. That is, the stronger certainty might have improved false-belief understanding at an early age. On the other hand, the weaker certainty

(uncertainty) appeared to operate in lessening one’s beliefs; therefore it may have undermined the children’ access to another’s mind. Thus, these results provide support for the hypotheses that children’s false-belief attributions were closely related to the linguistic references made to them.

epistemic states is related to the development of social understanding (Astington & Baird, 2005). Furthermore, the results showing variations in the children’s access to others’ minds according to the levels of certainty support the account that young children’s difficulty in false-belief understanding is bounded by linguistic demands (Lewis & Osborne, 1990). If this were the case, it would be possible to explain the 4-year-olds’ late understanding of the mind in the current study. There is a general consensus that children attribute false belief to others at the age of four. However, as noted in the Introduction of this chapter, Korean children tended to provide underdeveloped patterns at the age of four. Similarly, the 4-year-olds in the present study showed influences of the linguistic markers as they did not firmly understand others’ false beliefs whereas the 5-year-olds were able to do so regardless of linguistic

manipulation. It seems that language demands might explain the performance witnessed here. Researchers have highlighted the importance of mental-state talk of mothers to

preschoolers. Children who are frequently exposed to productive conversation in reference to the mind tend to master the false-belief task earlier than those who do not (Dunn & Brophy, 2005; Dunn et al., 1991; Ensor & Hughes, 2008; Harris, de Rosnay, & Pons, 2005; Ruffman et al., 2002; Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2008). It seems that Korean children might not have psychological discourse with their caregivers in an early age as those from Western cultures do. For example, Choi and Gopnik (1995) conducted a longitudinal study with Korean- and English-speaking children in their second year in order to investigate early semantic

development. They analysed the talk of caregivers to the child and divided into two terms for nouns and verbs: object vs. non-objects nouns and action vs. non-action verbs. The non- action verbs include references to psychological attributes. They found significant differences in utterances between mothers of the two cultures. It was observed that Korean mothers yielded action verbs more than non-action verbs. In contrast, English-speaking mothers’ utterances were the opposite. Thus, it seems possible that Korean children might have less

experience in mentalistic conversations, and this might lead to relatively late understanding of mental terms such as know or think which is importantly related to the development of social understanding.

Furthermore, it seems plausible that the grammatical structure of Korean, which is SOV (Subject Object Verb), and the acquisition of semantics might impact Korean children’s mental-state understanding. According to Lee and Kim (2009), in the SOV structure a verb completes the sentence and conveys salient information. Japanese has a similar structure and both languages can express a speaker’s certainty or evidentiality not only by verbs but also by sentence-ending suffixes (Choi, 1991; Matsui et al., 2006). It seems possible that the

acquisition of un/certainty might be acquired by grammatically encoded markers more than by mental-state verbs within languages which have the grammatical system for

certainty/evidentiality. For example, Matsui et al. (2006) reported the frequency of certainty and evidentiality by particles and relevant verbs from mother-child utterances in Japan. They found clear differences between particles and verbs. That is, both mothers and children identified the nature of a person’s knowledge by using certainty and evidentiality rather than selecting relevant verbs to perform the same function.

It seems that there are no data from Korean learners regarding their production of un/certainty comparing the grammatically embedded markers and mental-state verbs from mother-child utterances. However, it is conceivable that Korean learners may show a comparable pattern of the language acquisition to the Japanese samples given the same

grammatical structure and the system marking certainty/evidentiality. Based on this similarity, it seems plausible that Korean learners might acquire un/certainty particles more easily than mental-state verbs. The test questions used in the false-belief measures generally use mental- verb terms as mentioned in the Introduction section of this thesis. However, young Korean children might not be exposed frequently to such mental-verb terms. This tendency of

language exposure might have led to the 4-year-olds’ late acquisition of social understanding. Taken together, although verbs in Korean convey important information, learners of this language might be less frequently exposed to mental-state verbs with low input frequency of them from mothers, and they might understand others’ mental states by the grammaticalized expressions rather than verbs in an early age. Therefore, it is conceivable that the pattern of the language acquisition of Korean, with its particular language demands, might be related to the 4-year-olds’ relatively late development of social understanding in the current study.

With regard to the children’s performance, the findings replicated those of Chapter Two with the 3-year-olds, in particular from the 4-year-olds, but not the 5-year-olds. As stated above, the influences of the linguistic manipulation might be discovered from the population who did not develop a mental-state understanding. Although the differences in the tasks with/out the un/certainty markers were not statistically critical, the trend in the effects of the markers was replicated, suggesting that children’s access to epistemic states could appear differently depending on a speaker’s attitudes. The findings appeared to reflect that –keyss (- (u)l kes) (may) was regarded as an expression of one’s conjecture, whereas –ci (sure) was considered to express one’s truthful commitment to the proposition for the 3- and 4-year-olds throughout the two experiments. It seems also possible that certainty differentials might be recognized by the 5-year-olds; however, uncertainty might not influence when they were able to see from others’ point of view. Regarding certainty, there seemed no clear clue to explain the performance at-chance on the certainty task of the 5-year-olds. One possible explanation for this is that they made errors in understanding even though the younger children

understood appropriate use of the certainty marker (Strauss & Stavy, 1982). In the Discussion section of Chapter Two, I mentioned that the acquisition of the un/certainty markers might not be completed at the age of three as shown by the non-significant differences between the two markers. However, it seems possible that they might have acquired a distinction between

certainty and uncertainty, but the non-significant differences might have resulted from subtleness of the markers used here.

In summary, the findings from the two experiments indicate that language identifying mental states influences the young children’s access to others’ thoughts. However, certainty is an important factor in facilitating their understanding of mind in this. One’s confident attitude promotes the young children’s acquisition, while uncertainty did not facilitate.