Language Promotes False-Belief Understanding: Evidence From Learners of a New Sign Language

ABSTRACT— Developmental studies have identified a strong correlation in the timing of language development and false-belief understanding. However, the nature of this relationship remains unresolved. Does language promote false-belief understanding, or does it merely facilitate development that could occur independently, albeit on a delayed timescale? We examined language development and false-belief understanding in deaf learners of an emerging sign language in Nicaragua. The use of mental-state vocabulary and performance on a low-verbal false-belief task were assessed, over 2 years, in adult and adolescent users of Nicaraguan Sign Language. Results show that those adults who acquired a nascent form of the language during childhood produce few mental-state signs and fail to exhibit false-belief understanding. Furthermore, those whose language developed over the period of the study correspondingly developed in false-belief understanding. Thus, language learning, over and above social experience, drives the development of a mature theory of mind.     

The Relationship Between Academic Oral Proficiency and Reading Performance: A Comparative Study Between English Learners and English-Only Students

This study investigates the relationship between oral proficiency and reading proficiency in English-learning children (L2 students) and native English-speaking children (NE students). A set of oral activities measuring students’ academic oral skills in science classes was developed and administered to 61 fourth graders. Both the meaning-related aspects and the formal aspects of the students’ academic oral proficiency were compared between strong and struggling readers and between NE and L2 students. The study thus used a 2 × 2 factorial design (Strong/Struggling Readers × NE/L2 Students). After controlling for the students’ nonverbal analytic and reasoning skills, this study found that strong and struggling readers showed different levels of performance with respect to the meaning-related aspects of oral academic language but not with respect to the formal aspects of language. Conversely, differences between NE and L2 students were found in components related to the formal aspects but not in those related to the meaning aspects of oral language.     

Understanding Narratively,Understanding Alterity

Phenomenology's systematic exploration of how a world comes into existence for knowers – knowers who are often conceptualized as individual and ostensibly isolated – requires that it provide some account of the constitution of alterity. In this paper, I address this issue by arguing that we apperceive alterity in terms of the intentionality of behavior. A corollary of this argument is that the apperception of an alter as specifically human is a secondary attribution, following the primary apperception of intention. I further argue that the intentionality of behavior is understood through the projection of a narrative frame, or a “protonarrative,” onto the alter's behavior. I suggest that protonarrativity is the form that experience takes as its ontological condition. Our living is not simply known to us reflectively as protonarrative; rather, experience is lived as protonarrative.This essay is based on a paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences, Memphis, Tennessee, October 28–30, 2004.     

Narrative Competence of Adult L2 Russian Learners

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - Narrative competence is an essential part of language proficiency. Research of narrative competence has both a theoretical and empirical value. Our study aims...     

Understanding microworlds

Little is known about how individuals understand change in complex systems. In the natural world, for instance, the effects of change need to be understood in terms of two-way (interdependent) causal processes. Based on subject's ratings of the causal likelihood that a given change will yield a target effect and on subjects' ratings of the impact of a given change on specified populations in a microworld, White (1997, 2000) argued that individuals in fact understand change in terms of one-way causal processes and assume that causal effects decline with distance from the source of the change. An alternative view is that the ratings reflect individuals' mental simulations of change as elicited by the tasks. Experiments 1 and 2 confirm that such ratings are task dependent and that individuals make no general assumption that causal effects decrease with distance. Experiment 3 shows that when required to explain a pattern of change in the size of a population individuals can construct two-way causal explanations consistent with this mental simulation proposal.     

Understanding Truth

Book Information Understanding Truth. By Soames Scott. Oxford University Press. New York. 1999. Pp. ix + 268. Cloth.     

Understanding Beliefs

Beliefs are central to political psychology, but in many ways remain undertheorized. A good starting place for further thought is the typology of Smith, Bruner, and White that separates reality testing from the social and psychological functions of beliefs. The concept of beliefs has several connotations, some of which involve faith and emotions. It is often difficult to grasp others' beliefs, especially when they are foreign to us or morally repugnant. It is even more difficult to determine whether beliefs are powerful in the sense of determining behavior and autonomous in the sense of not being directly derivable from other factors. The Smith, Bruner, and White typology is useful here, helps us understand the operation of biases, and points to the multiple roles that beliefs play in people's lives, including managing trade-offs and generating what looks to others like hypocrisy.     

Understanding anthropologists

In this paper I show how to treat problems in the philosophy of the social sciences, in particular anthropology, without the need to settle questions in the theory of meaning about realism and anti‐realism. In doing this, I show how it is possible, contrary to received opinion, to ward off conceptual relativism without adoption of realist semantics. The argument involves sketching the feasibility of a viable non‐realist concept of objectivity. Having distinguished the required notion of objectivity, I then bring this to bear on issues that have dominated the philosophy of anthropology in recent years: the translatability of ritual beliefs; the adequacy of symbolist anthropology; the concept of rationality. I offer a new way of handling these issues which supports an anti‐realist, but intellectualist, account of ritual belief.     

Understanding sustainability

Proposed solutions to sustainability often bring different economic sectors into conflict; when a sustainable solution for one sector is non-sustainable for another it creates what we call the dilemma of sustainability. A recent example took place in the Columbia Basin of the Pacific Northwest, involving competing notions of sustainability by fisheries and the energy industry. Taking up some ideas of Eger and Lyotard, we criticize the constructivist approach which treats large ecosystems as constructions and the process of resolving conflicts of sustainability as one solely consisting of negotiations involving the trading off of interests. We propose instead to treat such conflict resolution via a Gadamerian-inspired hermeneutics that sees different economic sectors as having different interpretations of sustainability and that aims at common understanding.     

Understanding causation

Synthese - In Part I of ‘Causality and Determination” (CD), Anscombe writes that (1) we understand causality through understanding specific causal expressions, (2) efficient causation...     

Understanding sustainability

Proposed solutions to sustainability often bring different economic sectors into conflict; when a sustainable solution for one sector is non-sustainable for another it creates what we call the dilemma of sustainability. A recent example took place in the Columbia Basin of the Pacific Northwest, involving competing notions of sustainability by fisheries and the energy industry. Taking up some ideas of Eger and Lyotard, we criticize the constructivist approach which treats large ecosystems as constructions and the process of resolving conflicts of sustainability as one solely consisting of negotiations involving the trading off of interests. We propose instead to treat such conflict resolution via a Gadamerian-inspired hermeneutics that sees different economic sectors as having different interpretations of sustainability and that aims at common understanding.