MISUNDERSTANDING AND FALSE BELIEF:

EXPLANATIONS GIVEN BY CHILDREN AGED 4 TO 8 1

Ioanna BERTHOUD-PAPANDROPOULOU 2 Helga KILCHER
Université de Genève, Genève, Switzerland,
Ioanna.Berthoud@pse.unige.ch
Helga.Kilcher@pse.unige.ch

ABSTRACT
Misunderstanding due to lexical ambiguity arising in a dialogue has been
chosen as a favorable case of an auditor’s false belief about the
communicative intention of the speaker. Children were faced with a
conversation about objects between two speakers (represented by
puppets) who used the French noun glace in two different meanings
(“mirror” and “icecream”) and were then asked to explain the
utterances occurred (detection question) and to predict the next exchange
(repair question). 48 children aged 4 to 8 participated individually in this
study. Results show that detection in terms of the speaker’s false belief as
well as appropriate conversational repair of misunderstanding, very
unfrequent in the youngest group, gradually develop with age. However,
young children are often efficient in pursuing the speakers initial intent to
obtain the desired object. Reaction patterns evidenced by intra-individual
analysis will be discussed in the perspective of the relation between
metacognitive and metapragmatic competences.

KEYWORDS: lexical ambiguity, theory of mind, language development,

metapragmatic competences

INTRODUCTION

False belief is often studied in terms of the child’s local attribution of a

mental state to an actor within a given context. Success in typical so called false
belief tasks is precocious, and various experimental designs have been proposed in
order to evidence the childs early access to the mental world (Astington & Olson,
1995; Gopnik & Wellman, 1994). Our aim is on the one hand to assess the
children’s attribution of false belief based on language, and on the other hand to
1
This paper has been presented at the 1st Bisontine Conference for Conceptual and Linguistic
Development in the Child aged from 1 to 6 years, 2-3 December 1999, Besançon, France.
2
Corresponding address:
Ioanna Berthoud-Papandropoulou
Faculté de psychologie et des sciences de l'éducation, Université de Genève,
Boulevard du Pont-d'Arve 40, CH-1205 Genève

Iunie 2003 • Cogniţie, Creier, Comportament 111

make them discuss the reasons and the consequences of such a false belief
occurring within conversation.
Misunderstanding due to lexical ambiguity arising in a dialogue has been
chosen as a favorable case of an auditor’s false belief about the communicative
intention of the speaker. We are interested in (a) children’s capacity to detect a
misunderstanding, (b) their capacity to repare it by inventing appropriate further
verbal exchange. We suppose that adequate repair will develop later than correct
detection of misunderstanding, since it implies not only comprehension of False
Belief, but also being able to integrate that comprehension in a verbal exchange.

Procedure
The child (overhearer, see Clark, 1992) was presented with a
conversational exchange between two speakers (represented by puppets). A closed
box, which was not opened during the interview, had previously been presented as
containing various objects belonging to one of the speakers, named John. Another
speaker, Mary, had repeatedly come to ask for objects she needed. The item
analysed here is the Misunderstanding Item, running as follows:
Extralinguistic context: “Mary has bought a new hat and would like to
look at herself in a mirror (“ dans une glace, un miroir, tu sais”) but she doesn’t
have one at home. She comes to Mr. John and asks him:
Mary (first speaker) “ Est-ce que tu as une glace pour moi? ” (Do you have a
mirror for me?)
Mr John (second speaker) answers: “Je n’ai pas de glace dans ma boîte, ce n’est
pas un frigo!” (I do not have an icecream in my box, it is not a frigde!).

Two questions are then adressed to the child:

- “Why does Mr. John say that? ” (Detection question)
- “What do you imagine Mary will now say to Mr. John?” (Repair
question)

N.B. Before presenting the Misunderstanding Item, it was established that all
children knew both meanings of the term “glace”.

Population
48 French-speaking children, aged 4 to 8, were questioned individually.
They frequented ordinary schools and formed four age groups of 12 children each.

Age Number Mean age

4;6-5;4 12 4;10
5;6 - 6;5 12 5;9
6;8-7;6 12 7;0
7;8-8;5 12 8;0

112 Misunderstanding and false belief

 Coding
For the detection question (DQ), children’s responses were coded for the
following criteria:
− Extralinguistic indices (e.g. laughter)
− Mentioning one or both speakers
− Presence of referential expressions (icecream or mirror in the box or not
in the box)
− Presence of mental words (e.g. to belief, to think)

For the repair question (RQ), children’s responses were coded for the
following criteria:
− Repetition of the original request
− Paraphrasing the original request (using unambiguous terms)
− Conversational coherence (negative or adversative replies referring to
the original request)

RESULTS

For the Detection Question, three types of reactions have been evidenced.
− Elementary Reactions, consisting in non-responses or in litteral
explanations of second speaker’s utterance.
Example
1) Léo 4;7 (DQ: Why does Mr. John say that?) Because a box is not a
fridge (Parce qu’une boîte c’est pas un frigo)
− Dialogical Reasons, consisting in invoking the first speaker’s utterance in
order to explain the second speaker’s reply.
Example
2) Auré 6;3 Because she had to say (she should have said) hm... hm... do
you have a mirror (Parce qu’il fallait qu’elle dire euh... euh... est-ce que t’as un
miroir)
− False Belief Detections, consisting in invoking the second speaker’s
mental state in order to explain his utterance.
Example
3) Loa 7;9 Because he believes it is an icecream (Parce qu’il croit que
c’est une glace à manger)
4) Cand 7;9 Because he maybe understood that it was an icecream and
that he didn’t have one (Parce qu’il a peut-être compris que c’était une glace pour
manger, puis qu’il en avait pas)
Only this last type of reaction has been considered as revealing a real
detection of misunderstanding, since children establish a link between the
utterance to be explained and the mental state of the speaker. In contrast, a
dialogical reason refers only to the conversational partner’s original inefficient
request.

Iunie 2003 • Cogniţie, Creier, Comportament 113

 For the Repair Question too, three types of reactions have been evidenced.
−Incapacity of imagining the next turn-taking (i.e. first speaker’s reply to
second speaker’s utterance), consisting in either silences or endings of the
verbal exchange.
Example
5) Eli 6;3 (RQ: What do you imagine Mary will now say to Mr. John?)
“Never mind!” (“Tant pis!”)
− Nominal Repairs, by which the child reformulates the first speaker’s
request using an appropriate unambiguous noun.
6) Evi 5;0 She (Mary) will say that she still needs a mirror (Elle va dire
qu’elle a quand-même besoin d’un miroir)
7) Van 7;9 Now she could say “do you have a mirror?” (Maintenant elle
pourrait dire “est-ce que t’as un miroir?”)
− Conversational Repairs, which take into account the whole previous
exchange and in some way explicits the misunderstanding itself by stating
the two interpretations of the ambiguous word.
8) Aud 5;8 She will maybe say to him “ not for licking (gesture), but for
looking (gesture) ” (Elle va peut-être lui dire “pas pour lécher (geste), mais pour
se regarder (geste)”)
9) Jea 7;5 She will say it’s not a /glace/ to eat but a /glace/ to look at
oneself (Elle va dire que c’est pas une glace pour manger mais une glace pour se
regarder dedans)
10) Laur 8;0 “But it is not a /glace/ to eat, it’s a /glace/ like a mirror, a
mirror” (“Mais c’est pas une glace à manger, c’est une glace comme un miroir, un
miroir”)
In contrast to Nominal Repairs, Conversational Repairs suggest that
children conceive each speaker as having understood the given term in a different
manner. Moreover, adversative and negative expressions contained in first
speaker’s imagined reply show the children’s ability to linguistically relate
successive turn-takings.

Table I.
Overall results for Detection and Repair, in %.
DETECTION-Q REPAIR-Q

Age Elementary Dialogical False Belief Non Nominal Conversat.

Reactions Reasons Detection Repair Repair Repair

4-5 (N 12) 83 0 17 42 50 8
5-6 (N12) 58 8 33 67 8 25
6-7 (N12) 33 17 50 33 25 42
7-8 (N12) 8 8 83 0 33 67

114 Misunderstanding and false belief

 As far as the Detection Question is concerned, the majority of children
present either Elementary Reactions or correct False Belief Detections. Dialogical
Reasons are extremely unfrequent.
For the Repair Question, all three types of reactions are represented,
although in different proportions according to the age of the children (see Table
1).
Figure 1 focuses on the distribution of the most advanced type of reaction
for both questions, through the four age groups. It shows that the proportion of
False Belief Detections of the misunderstanding is rather low in the 4-5 years old
group (17%). Regularly increasing with age, this proportion reaches 50% in the 6-
7 year old group. FB Detection is the main reaction only in the oldest group (83%
of the subjects of this group). A similar increase is observed for the
Conversational Repairs, with slightly lower scores at all age groups.

90

80

70

60

50
False Belief Detection
40

30 Conversational Repair

20

10

0
4-5 years 5-6 years 6-7 years 7-8 years

Figure 1. False Belief Detection & Conversational Repair in percentage by age

An intraindividual analysis (Table 2) indicates that there is a strong

association between a child’s reaction to the Detection Question and his/hers
subsequent proposition of a Repair; this is the case between the two elementary
types of behavior (Non-Detection associated with Non-Repair) as well as between
the most advanced ones (False Belief Detection associated with Conversational
Repair): 65% of the population present one of these two associations.
Heterogeneous associations affect essentially Nominal Repair: this reaction occurs
in 17% of the subjects with non Detection and in 13% with False belief Detection.

Iunie 2003 • Cogniţie, Creier, Comportament 115

Table 2.
Reactions to Detection and Repair. Intra individual analysis results, in %.
Non-Detection: Elem/Dial False Belief Detection
Non-Repair 33 2
Nominal Repair 17 13
Conversational Repair 4 31

Figure 2 gives the detail per age of those heterogeneous associations. It

shows that Nominal Repair is a solution chosen often by the youngest children (6
out of 12), and that the majority of them has previously not been able to detect the
Misunderstanding. In contrast, older children (from 6-7 years up), when
presenting Nominal Repairs (7 out of 24), are mainly False Beliefs Detectors.

4
FB Detection
3
Non-Detection
2

0
4-5 5-6 6-7 7-8
years years years years

Figure 2. Nominal Repairs and Types of detection in frequency

DISCUSSION

The different reaction types elicited by the detection question suggest that
the attribution of first-level False Belief to a speaker is of a relatively late
development. Indeed, only 7-8 old children systematically explain the
misunderstanding due to lexical polysemy by invoking the speakers False Belief
about the meaning intended by the conversational partner. Correlatively, in the
Repair question, several types of reaction have also been evidenced. The so-called
“conversational repair” is of a late development too: it implies for the children to
take into account the whole previous exchange thus highlighting the

116 Misunderstanding and false belief

misunderstanding itself, in order to imagine the subsequent exchange.
Conversational repairs require meta (or epi-) linguistic approach of the say and
mean distinction (Olson & Babu, 1992). False Belief detections and
Conversational Repairs follow similar developmental lines and show at all age
groups a decalage in favour of detection; suprisingly, this decalage is slight.
Intermediary reactions are found for both tasks. In the Detection task they
are not frequent, however: we may conclude that children have or have not an
appropriate understanding of False Belief, even in our more complexe task
involving conversation.
In contrast, intermediary reactions are frequent for the Repair task: the so-
called Nominal Repairs reveal that children are able to keep in mind the
communicative intention underlying the original request, as well as to reformulate
it in an unambiguous way in order to make it efficient.
Misunderstanding is thus avoided, but the Repair is pragmatically non
entirely adequate.
Such a focus on a referential level (developmentally preceding the mental
and linguistic level) have been evidenced in our previous studies on childrens’
ability to explain another person’s talk, and on children’s metacognitive
understanding of epistemic states like uncertainty (Berthoud-Papandropoulou &
Kilcher, 1996; 1997). Another sign of the intermediary nature of Nominal repairs
is that they can be associated with both failure and success in False Belief
detections, as the intraindividual analysis shows. Particularly young subjects tend
to propose Nominal Repairs after having given reactions of Non-Detection, and
older subjects propose such repairs although they have been able to attribute False
Belief to the speaker. This findings are examples of the fact that an apparently
identical behavior may have two different developmental meanings: for young
children Nominal Repairs may be understood as reflecting the child’s focusing on
the material object to be given, as well as on the desire of the first speaker (a
volitional mental state appearing earlier than epistemic mental states like False
Belief). For older children, Nominal Repairs may function as reformulations of
the request in a non ambiguous way; they however do not mention the
misunderstanding itself, although they have previously correctly detected it.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

As we supposed, detecting False Belief based on language is of a later

development than False Belief in classical types of tasks.
As far as the relations between detection and repair of misunderstanding
is concerned, our hypothesis of a decalage is not confirmed: intraindividual
patterns reveal strong homogeneity between the two capacities, the one more
metacognitive, the other more metalinguistic one. This homogeneity is observed
for extreme reactions (elementary and most developed ones).

Iunie 2003 • Cogniţie, Creier, Comportament 117

 Intermediary types of reactions introduce some heterogeneity in the
results, since a given metalinguistic repair is likely to coexist with
developmentally qualitatively different metacognitive understandings. Such an
heterogeneity, found often at intermediary age groups, shows the complexity of
the relations between metacognitive and metalinguistic competences and their
relative temporary independency.

REFERENCES

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118 Misunderstanding and false belief