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Lexical Pragmatics and Theory of Mind
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Volume 201
Lexical Pragmatics and Theory of Mind. The acquisition of connectives
by Sandrine Zufferey
Lexical Pragmatics
and Theory of Mind
The acquisition of connectives
Sandrine Zufferey
University of Geneva
John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Zufferey, Sandrine.
Lexical pragmatics and theory of mind : the acquisition of connectives / Sandrine Zufferey.
p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 201)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Grammar, Comparative and general--Connectives. 2. Language acquisition. 3. Pragmat-
ics. 4. Discourse analysis. I. Title.
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Table of content
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
chapter 1
The concept of theory of mind in pragmatics 5
1.1 Defining theory of mind 6
1.1.1 The false belief task 7
1.1.2 Problems and controversies related to the false belief task 8
1.1.3 Acquired concept or innate mental module? 10
1.1.4 Arguments from the neuroscience of theory of mind 13
1.2 Theory of mind and theories of verbal communication 15
1.2.1 The code model of communication 15
1.2.2 Grices model of communication 16
1.2.3 Relevance theory 19
1.2.4 A specialized sub-module of theory of mind dedicated
to verbal communication? 22
1.3 Summary 24
chapter 2
The co-acquisition of language and theory of mind 27
2.1 The main stages of language acquisition 28
2.2 The development of theory of mind abilities 30
2.2.1 The main stages of theory of mind development 30
2.2.1.1 Very young children (018 months) 31
2.2.1.2 18 months 32
2.2.1.3 From 18 months to 3 years 33
2.2.1.4 From 3 to 6 years 33
2.2.1.5 After 6 years 35
2.2.2 What do the developmental stages of theory of mind tell us
about the nature of this cognitive ability? 35
2.2.3 Individual differences in theory of mind development 38
vi Lexical Pragmatics and Theory of Mind
2.3 Interdependence of language and theory of mind 39

2.3.1 Pragmatic competence: Between language and theory of mind 40
2.3.2 The role of language in theory of mind development 42
2.3.2.1 Language as a trigger for theory of mind abilities 43
2.3.2.2 Are some aspects of language specifically related
to theory of mind? 45
2.3.2.3 What the study of adult aphasics can tell us about
the relation between language and theory of mind 47
2.3.3 Theory of mind development as a pre-requisite
for language acquisition 48
2.3.4 The development of language and theory of mind:
A mutual influence scenario 49
2.4 Summary 50
chapter 3
Insights from autism on language and theory of mind 53
3.1 Autism: A definition 53
3.1.1 The biological basis of autism 54
3.1.2 The autistic spectrum 55
3.1.2.1 Asperger syndrome 56
3.1.2.2 Semantic-pragmatic disorder 56
3.2 Language and communication impairments in autism 58
3.2.1 Handling the formal aspects of language 58
3.2.2 Pragmatic abilities 60
3.2.2.1 The social side of pragmatics 61
3.2.2.2 The cognitive side of pragmatics 61
3.3 The mindblindness hypothesis 63
3.3.1 The nature of theory of mind impairment in autism 63
3.3.2 Language and communication deficits related
to theory of mind 64
3.4 The weak central coherence hypothesis 66
3.4.1 A cognitive style biased towards the treatment of details 66
3.4.2 Communicative impairments due to weak central coherence 67
3.5 Other pathologies associated with a deficit in theory of mind 68
3.5.1 Schizophrenia 69
3.5.2 Right-hemisphere damage 70
3.6 Summary 71
Table of content vii
chapter 4
Language as a window into childrens developing theory of mind 73
4.1 Theory of mind in language 74
4.1.1 Evidentials 74
4.1.2 Modal verbs 77
4.1.3 Words for mental states 78
4.1.4 Syntax and theory of mind 79
4.2 Acquiring the language of theory of mind 82
4.2.1 Methodological considerations 82
4.2.2 The acquisition of mental state terms 83
4.2.3 The acquisition of modal verbs 86
4.2.4 The acquisition of evidential morphology 88
4.2.5 The acquisition of embedded structures 90
4.3 Summary 94
chapter 5
Discourse connectives and theory of mind 97
5.1 The notion of domains of use 98
5.1.1 Sweetsers tripartite division 98
5.1.2 Alternative proposals 100
5.2 A cognitive analysis of domains of use 103
5.2.1 Domains of use and theory of mind 103
5.2.2 Domains of use and processing cost 104
5.2.3 Previous empirical data on processing cost 107
5.3 Hypotheses regarding the acquisition of domains of use 110
5.4 The domains of use of French causal connectives 113
5.5 The procedural meaning of puisque 115
5.5.1 Previous analyses of puisque 115
5.5.2 Puisque as a marker of echoic use of language 117
5.5.3 Puisque and theory of mind abilities 120
5.6 Summary 122
chapter 6
Empirical study on the acquisition of the French connective parce que 123
6.1 The acquisition of domains of use 123
6.1.1 Kyratzis, Guo and Ervin-Tripp 124
6.1.2 Spooren and Sanders 126
6.1.3 Evers-Vermeul 127
6.1.4 Comparison of results 129
viii Lexical Pragmatics and Theory of Mind
6.2 The acquisition of the French connective parce que: A corpus study 131
6.2.1 Data 131
6.2.2 Methodology 131
6.2.3 Results 134
6.3 Discussion of results 137
6.3.1 Order of acquisition and cognitive complexity 138
6.3.2 The acquisition of epistemic uses and theory
of mind development 139
6.3.3 Cognitive complexity or parental input? 141
6.4 The use of parce que by autistic children 144
6.5 Summary 146
chapter 7
Empirical study on the acquisition of the French connective puisque 147
7.1 Corpus data for the acquisition of puisque 148
7.1.1 Production of puisque between age two and four 148
7.1.2 Parental input for the connective puisque 151
7.2 The acquisition of irony 152
7.2.1 Developmental data 152
7.2.2 Measures used to test the comprehension of irony 154
7.3 The development of second-order theory of mind abilities 157
7.3.1 The Perner and Wimmer test 157
7.3.2 The earliest age of success for second-order theory
of mind tests 158
7.4 Design of an experiment on the acquisition of puisque 161
7.4.1 Subjects 161
7.4.2 Material 161
7.4.3 Procedure 164
7.5 Results 165
7.6 Discussion 167
7.6.1 Comparison with previous studies 167
7.6.2 Puisque versus parce que 169
7.6.3 Correlations between puisque and second-order theory
of mind 170
7.6.4 The role of puisque for the comprehension of irony 170
7.6.5 Developmental effect 171
7.7 Summary 172
Conclusion 173
Bibliography 177
Index 191
Acknowledgments
My first word of thanks goes to Jacques Moeschler, who made me discover and
love pragmatics, and whose advice has been crucial for my work ever since. I
am also greatly indebted to Anne Reboul, who always gave me very stimulating
and insightful feedback on my work during the numerous discussions we have
had over the years. This book is a revised and translated version of my doctoral
dissertation, completed at the University of Geneva in November 2007. In am
therefore grateful to all the members of my thesis committee for their valuable
comments and support: Jacques Moeschler, Anne Reboul, Deirdre Wilson, Ted
Sanders, Ira Noveck and ric Wehrli. Thanks are also due to the University of
Geneva for the grant that gave me the opportunity to work full-time on this
book for one semester. Many thanks to all those who contributed to the experi-
mental data presented in Chapter 7, either by helping me to create the material
or by allowing me to collect data in several primary schools in Geneva. Finally,
I would like to express gratitude to my parents, to all the members of my family
and to my friends, for their constant love and support. Most of all, I would like
to thank my husband, Andrei Popescu-Belis, for his insightful comments on the
draft manuscript, but more importantly for persuading me that I can do every-
thing. When I defended my thesis in 2007 I was expecting my son Alexandre,
and while I turned it into this book I was expecting my daughter lise so a
great many thanks to both of them for accompanying me during this adventure
and for making my life beautiful every day.
Introduction
The concept of theory of mind, a hot topic in cognitive psychology for the past
twenty-five years, has gained increasing importance in the fields of linguistics and
pragmatics. However, even though the existence of a relationship between theory
of mind and verbal communication is now recognized, the extent, causality and
full implications of this connection remain largely to be explored. This book has
two objectives: first, to present a comprehensive discussion of the interface be-
tween language, communication, and theory of mind; and second, to put forward
and test an innovative proposal regarding the role of discourse connectives in this
interface. The proposed role of connectives is validated from the perspective of
their acquisition, using empirical methods such as corpus analysis and controlled
experiments, thus placing the study of connectives within the emerging frame-
work of experimental pragmatics.
The book begins with an analysis of the points of convergence between the-
ory of mind on the one hand and language and communication on the other.
Chapter1 shows how the notions of theory of mind and verbal communication
can be defined using terms which are compatible from a theoretical perspective.
A detailed review of existing data leads to the conclusion that relevance theory
(Sperber and Wilson 1986) is a well-suited model of communication to account
for the role of theory of mind and that the notion of theory of mind itself is best
thought of as a mental module (Baron-Cohen 1995; Leslie 1994) gradually devel-
oping from birth and throughout childhood.
The initial analysis is developed into a model of how language, pragmatic
abilities and theory of mind abilities are concurrently acquired during childrens
first years of life (Chapter 2). Because of its key role in communication, the devel-
opment of a theory of mind is crucial for the acquisition of pragmatics by young
children, while the lexicon is another aspect of language development that has
recently been argued to require theory of mind abilities (Bloom 2000). But con-
versely, language acquisition also seems to influence the course of theory of mind
development in several ways. For instance, a study on autistic children (Happ
1995) has pointed to the role of verbal age as a stronger predictor of theory of
mind abilities than chronological age or non-verbal IQ. The question then is to
determine whether this link bears on the language faculty as a whole or whether
some aspects of language are more specifically necessary for the development of
theory of mind. I will argue that the latter proposition is too strong for several
reasons. First, it is often impossible to disentangle the roles played by the semantic
information contained in lexical items from the syntactic structures in which they
are used. In addition, this hypothesis leads de facto to a form of linguistic deter-
minism, yet no study has convincingly shown that the course of theory of mind
development is affected by childrens mother tongue. In view of all these argu-
ments, I will explain how theory of mind and language are acquired concurrently
during the childs first years of life.
A number of linguistic and pragmatic impairments are commonly associated
with autism, a neurodevelopmental disorder involving a triad of impairments
including the inability to use language appropriately for communication (DSM-
IV 2000) and which is characterized by a pronounced deficit in theory of mind
(Chapter 3). The range of pragmatic impairments observed in autism leads to the
conclusion that theory of mind cannot account for all of them, and that the ability
to integrate different kinds of contextual information should also be taken into
account. Frith and Happ (1994) have proposed a cognitive model accounting for
some additional weaknesses and strengths of the autistic population called weak
central coherence. I will argue that taken together, the two models provide an ad-
equate framework to account for the communication deficits in autism, because
they include the two major ingredients of successful verbal communication: the
ability to reason about mental states and the ability to integrate contextual infor-
mation in order to enrich linguistic meaning. Other cognitive pathologies that
have been said to involve a theory of mind deficit, namely schizophrenia (Frith
and Corcoran 1996) and right hemisphere damage (Surian and Siegal 2001) will
be discussed as well. The conclusion reached in view of the existing data is that
even though these populations also fail standard theory of mind tests, they do not
suffer from a specific deficit in mental state attribution as is the case for autistic
subjects, therefore autism remains the most appropriate impairment to study in
relation to language and theory of mind.
I will then focus on the opportunity to use childrens developing linguistic
abilities as a window on their developing theory of mind abilities (Chapter 4). The
appropriate use of certain words or syntactic constructions specifically dedicated
to the communication of mental states, such as mental state verbs (Bartsch and
Wellman 1995), epistemic modals (Papafragou 1998), evidential morphology in
languages like Turkish or Korean (Papafragou et al. 2007), or tensed complement
clauses (de Villiers and Pyers 2002) can be seen as an indicator that children have
acquired the corresponding mental state concepts. The argument will start with a
critical review of previous studies focusing on the acquisition of such lexical items
or syntactic constructions. Overall, the relative homogeneity in the age of acqui-
sition of these items across languages, irrespective of the way they are encoded
Introduction
(in the lexicon or in verbal morphology), is seen as an indicator of the universal

influence of theory of mind on their development.
An innovative analysis of discourse connectives will reveal several points of
convergence between the use of these items and theory of mind abilities (Chap-
ter5). In some cases, the relation between connectives and theory of mind comes
from the domain in which they are used (in particular the epistemic domain, in
Sweetsers (1990) terminology), while in other cases connectives are intrinsically
related to theory of mind because of the very nature of their procedural mean-
ing. In other words, because of their meaning, all uses of certain connectives re-
quire theory of mind abilities, and some of them even require second-order or
advanced theory of mind (the reasoning involved can be represented as: X thinks
that Y thinks Z). The French causal connective puisque is a case in point. A new
analysis of this connective reveals that all of its uses can be accounted for in a uni-
fied way using the notion of echoic use proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986).
What makes connectives particularly interesting to study in relation to the de-
velopment of theory of mind abilities is that the same words can also be used to
relate other kinds of propositional content. Therefore, the order of acquisition
(for a single connective) between these domains can be seen as a reflection of the
emergence of theory of mind. This analysis of connectives domains of use and
procedural meaning leads to precise, testable hypotheses regarding the order of
acquisition between different connectives, as well as between various uses of the
same connective.
I will finally present new empirical evidence in favor of the proposed analy-
sis, focusing on the acquisition of the French causal connectives parce que and
puisque. The former connective has many different uses, including in the epis-
temic domain, and a longitudinal study on its acquisition concludes that epis-
temic uses are acquired later than other uses, consistently reflecting childrens
developing theory of mind (Chapter 6). The connective puisque is intrinsically
related to theory of mind because of its procedural meaning, and a controlled
experiment confirms that puisque is indeed acquired hand in hand with childrens
first- and second-order theory of mind abilities, when it is used to convey ironic
meaning (Chapter 7). Taken together, these empirical results provide a strong
confirmation of the role of theory of mind in the use of connectives.
This approach, grounded in experimental pragmatics, sheds new light on
theoretical questions regarding the interface between theory of mind and prag-
matics. Therefore, this book reflects a new approach to linguistics and pragmatics,
which closely integrates theoretical analyses and their empirical validation.
chapter 1
The concept of theory of mind in pragmatics
Where does the concept of theory of mind come from and why has it become
such a crucial area of social cognition? How can theory of mind abilities be mea-
sured? What triggers the development of theory of mind abilities? By answering
these questions through theoretical and empirical arguments, the first part of this
chapter will lead to a model of theory of mind as a mental module gradually de-
veloping from birth until late childhood.
The second part of the chapter will be dedicated to the possible interfaces be-
tween theory of mind and verbal communication. According to the code model of
communication, which prevailed in linguistics and pragmatics until the middle of
the twentieth century, communicating verbally is only a matter of encoding and
decoding messages, hence speakers do not need theory of mind abilities in order
to communicate successfully. However, independently of the theory of mind issue,
the code model of communication has been strongly criticized on many different
grounds, and most contemporary pragmatic theories have abandoned this model.
The turning point in pragmatic studies came with the work of Grice and the
inferential model of communication he has proposed. I will therefore briefly pres-
ent Grices model and show how the notion of inference implies the necessity of
possessing theory of mind abilities in order to communicate. However, Grices
theory was philosophical rather than psychological in nature, and his description
of inferential phenomena presupposes a form of complex and conscious reason-
ing that is quite implausible from a cognitive perspective. An even more serious
problem for his account is that all forms of verbal communication would require
full-fledged theory of mind abilities. Several paradoxes arise from this conclusion:
How can young children, who do not have full-fledged theory of mind abilities,
communicate successfully in many situations? Why are autistic children, who
lack theory of mind abilities, able to communicate at all?
This chapter and the following one will propose several ways of solving these
paradoxes, while maintaining an inferential model of communication. The first
solution consists in adopting a more flexible view of the possible communication
strategies used by speakers. Within the framework of relevance theory, Sperber
(1994) has for instance suggested three strategies of increasing cognitive com-
plexity that could account for childrens gradual progress in communication
skills. The second line of explanation that is supported by the recent literature is
that very young children may have much more complex mind-reading abilities
than previously thought, but that the understanding of these abilities had until
recently been obscured by standard measures of theory of mind. The latter pos-
sibility will be discussed in the next chapter, together with a presentation of the
developmental time course of theory of mind abilities.
1.1 Defining theory of mind
The possession of theory of mind abilities broadly designates the capacity to at-
tribute mental states to oneself and to others, and to reason on the basis of this
information in order to interpret and predict others behaviors. Such is the im-
portance of theory of mind abilities for human life that they have sometimes been
considered to be the main defining characteristic of human beings, differentiat-
ing them from the other animal species. Somewhat paradoxically, the notion of
theory of mind was first coined by two primatologists, Premack and Woodruff
(1978), who tried to find out whether chimpanzees have a theory of mind. This
pioneering work has subsequently encouraged psychologists to define more pre-
cisely what having a theory of mind means for humans, as well as to identify the
range of behaviors that reflect the presence of this ability in a subject.
In addition to investigating whether this ability is specific to humans or shared
with other species, researchers working on the concept of theory of mind have
mainly addressed two other issues. The first one is the acquisition of theory of mind
abilities by normally developing children, and the second one is the absence or de-
lay in theory of mind abilities in people suffering from autism. These two questions
will be discussed in detail in Chapters 2 and 3 respectively. The goal of this first
section is to provide a global overview of the main questions that have fuelled the
debate around the notion of theory of mind. The tests that are most commonly used
to assess this ability will first be presented (1.1.1), explaining why they are now con-
troversial in many respects (1.1.2). To a large extent, these debates and controversies
are due to the variety of views on the notion of theory of mind itself (1.1.3). While
this notion is treated by some as a concept that has to be learned by children dur-
ing their preschool years, it is considered by others to be an innate mental module;
more recently, studies in the field of social neuroscience have shed some new light
on these questions. The last subsection will bring additional evidence for the mental
module models of theory of mind, supported by dedicated brain circuitry, based on
recent brain imaging studies involving theory of mind abilities (1.1.4).
. This question has turned out to be a very difficult one and remains quite controversial. Re-
cent work, for instance by Povinelli and Vonk (2004), seems to indicate that the abilities of chim-
panzees do not imply that they possess a theory of mind comparable to that of human beings.
Chapter 1. The concept of theory of mind in pragmatics
1.1.1 The false belief task
To test the possession of adult-like mindreading abilities, psychologists have de-

veloped a method to determine if a subject has a deep comprehension of others
minds that is in all other respects simple enough to be understood even by a young
child. The method takes into account the fact that, in order to demonstrate the
presence of mindreading abilities in a subject, it is not enough to prove that the
subject (A) can predict the actions of another individual (B). As Dennett (1978)
has argued, in many cases A can perform this task without attributing mental
states to B, only by using his own world knowledge. For example, if A knows that
the basket in front of him contains biscuits, and sees B trying to find food, A can
predict that B will look into the basket, not by attributing mental states to B, but
because A knows the biscuits really are in the basket. Therefore, in order to make
sure that the subjects dissociate their own beliefs from that of others, one has to
devise a situation where another individual entertains a belief different from the
subjects belief. This reasoning has led to the development of the well-known false
belief task, which now exists in dozens of different variants.
The first version of the false belief task, also called the unexpected transfer
task, is found in the work of Wimmerand Perner (1983) on childrens under-
standing of deception, and takes place in two successive phases. First, the child
hears the following story (Wimmer and Perner 1983:109)while seeing the scene
being enacted:
Mother returns from her shopping trip. She bought chocolate for a cake. Maxi
may help her put away the things. He asks her: Where should I put the choc-
olate? In the blue cupboard says the mother. Wait, Ill lift you up, because
youre too small. Mother lifts him up. Maxi puts the chocolate in the blue cup-
board. Maxi remembers exactly where he put the chocolate so that he could come
back and get some later. He loves chocolate. Then he leaves for the playground.
Mother starts to prepare the cake and takes the chocolate out of the blue cup-
board. She grates a bit into the dough and then she does not put it back into the
blue but into the green cupboard. Now she realizes that she forgot to buy eggs. So
she goes to her neighbor for some eggs. There comes Maxi back from the play-
ground, hungry, and he wants to get some chocolate. He still remembers where
he had put the chocolate.
Then the child is asked the following questions:
. The story actually continued following two different scenarios: one where Maxi is trying to
deceive his brother by giving him the wrong information and the other where he is cooperative
and tells the truth. The details of this part of the story have not been reproduced here because
they are not directly relevant for the false belief paradigm.
1. Where will Maxi look for the chocolate?

2. Where is the chocolate really?
3. Do you remember where Maxi put the chocolate in the beginning?
The first question targets the childs ability to understand that Maxi has a false
belief regarding the place where the chocolate is. The other two questions are
control questions to assess whether the child has understood the story and re-
members it correctly.
The false belief task described above can be used to determine experimentally
the age from which children start possessing adult-like theory of mind abilities.
Another important question in the theory of mind debate is whether some indi-
viduals, be they children or adults, are specifically impaired in this respect. This
is the hypothesis made by Baron-Cohen et al. (1985) in order to explain autistic
subjects social and communicative impairments. These researchers have devised
a simplified version of the false belief task, in order to make it usable with autistic
children. Their task, called the Sally-Anne task, has become the most popular ver-
sion of the false belief task. The story is enacted with two puppets called Sally and
Anne and goes as follows:
Sally has a basket and Anne has a box. Sally has a marble and she puts it into her
basket. She then goes out. Anne takes out Sallys marble and puts it into her box
while Sally is away. Now Sally comes back and wants to play with her marble.
After hearing the story, children have to answer questions along the same lines
as those presented in Wimmer and Perners story. Only children with functional
theory of mind abilities should be able to answer correctly that Anne will act ac-
cording to her own (false) belief and look for her marble in the basket rather than
in the box, where it really is.
1.1.2 Problems and controversies related to the false belief task
Despite its great popularity and numerous replications, the false belief task has
also been the subject of many criticisms. The first problem often pointed out is
that passing it requires more than just mindreading abilities (Surian and Leslie
1999; Bloom and German 2000). In order to answer the final questions correctly,
the subject has to be able to follow and understand the story, which may be rather
demanding for short term memory. Besides, the story itself may be linguistically
too complex and this may cause young children to misunderstand it. Moreover,
the formulation of the test question may also be too complex and children may
simply not understand it correctly either. In fact, some researchers have shown
that a simple modification of the test question into Where will Sally look first for
Chapter 1. The concept of theory of mind in pragmatics
her marble? was enough to improve the rate of success amongst young children
(Lewis and Osborne 1990; Siegal and Beattie 1991). Another possible shortcom-
ing of this task stems precisely from the fact that it requires the subject to attribute
a false belief to another person. A child may be reluctant to do so, since as Leslie
(1994) pointed out, beliefs are made to be true and treated as such by young chil-
dren. In other words, in order to succeed, children must be able to ignore a simple
and useful heuristic that could be paraphrased as: people act according to their
desires and to reality. Finally, it is also possible that, even if children understand
the story correctly, they do not understand that seeing something leads people to
entertain beliefs on the basis of this observation (Wimmer et al. 1988).
In an attempt to answer these criticisms, a different version of the false belief
task has been devised, involving a box with an unexpected content. The most
well-known version of this task is called the Smarties task (Perner et al. 1987;
Gopnik and Astington1988). In this task, children are presented with a candy
container (usually a Smarties box) and asked what they think it contains. Then
the experimenter opens the box to reveal its real content. Contrary to childrens
expectations, the box does not contain candies but only a pencil. Then the chil-
dren are asked what they thought was in the box before the experimenter opened
it. In another version of this task, the children are asked what another child who
hasnt seen the box opened would answer if asked what was inside it. This task is
an improvement with respect to the classical version because it does not require
the children the follow a story in order to be able to answer the test questions.
However, the results obtained with this revised version are not significantly dif-
ferent, since children are able to perform the task at around the same age as in the
classical version.
Regardless of the specific task, almost all studies find that children only pass
these tests after the age of four. Moreover, the great majority of autistic children
systematically fail until they reach the mental age of ten years, and many of them
keep on failing even after that age (Happ 1995). Despite this general tendency,
the hundreds of studies involving a version of the false belief task do not provide
completely coherent results. Some studies have for instance slightly varied one pa-
rameter of the test, leading to different results. For instance, as mentioned above,
the reformulation of the test question with the expression look first instead of just
look is enough to increase the rate of success amongst three-year-olds.
These apparent contradictions have led Wellman et al. (2001) to exploit the
large quantity of existing data on the false belief task by conducting a meta-analy-
sis in order to isolate all the potentially important factors influencing the age of
success. These authors gathered 77 articles reporting on experiments using the
false belief task, representing a total of 178 different studies and 591 different ex-
perimental conditions. This analysis revealed that six factors had an influence on
10 Lexical Pragmatics and Theory of Mind
the results, amongst which were: whether the child performed the object transfer
himself or not; whether the object was transferred in order to deceive the pro-
tagonist or not; and the specific country of origin of the children. Despite the
existence of such factors, Wellman and his colleagues conclude from their meta-
analysis that the transition between failure and success reliably occurs during the
preschool years.
More recent work (Onishi and Baillargeon 2005; Surian et al. 2007), using
a fully non-verbal version of the task based on looking time, seems to indicate
that children as young as 13 or 15 months may have an implicit form of theory of
mind. The possible implications of these new results will be discussed in detail in
Chapter 2 (Section 2.2), in the context of the developmental time line of childrens
theory of mind abilities.
1.1.3 Acquired concept or innate mental module?
The lively, ongoing debate around the validity of the false belief task reflects a more
fundamental question regarding the exact extension of theory of mind abilities,
and the required cognitive abilities in relation to success or failure at the test.
According to one account (Perner 1991; Wellman 1990; Gopnik and Astington
1988), the transition between failure and success at the task reflects a radical
change occurring in childrens cognition around the age of four. Before that age,
children fail false belief tests mainly because they do not have a concept of belief
yet, and their nascent psychological theory is deemed to be primarily based on
desire as the main motivator for human actions. According to these researchers,
the acquisition of the concept of belief around the age of four occurs through
learning and interaction with the childs environment. Moreover, the processes
that lead to this acquisition are considered to be general and even comparable
to the processes underlying the construction of a scientific theory. Because of
this comparison, this account is often called the theory theory position, because it
implies that the method used by children to predict and interpret other peoples
mental states amounts to a nave theory of the structure and functioning of the
human mind.
In the theory theory view, childrens theory of mind encompasses a set of rules
and symbol manipulation and works on an inferential basis, with mental states
such as beliefs being treated as theoretical entities. Children therefore acquire a
functional theory of mind by adding elements to their set of knowledge (i.e. their
theory). There are numerous versions of the theory theory view, but they all share
one fundamental assumption: failure at the false belief task reveals a problem of
cognitive competence, which changes radically around the age of four.
Chapter 1. The concept of theory of mind in pragmatics 11
A completely different explanation has been proposed by Gordon (1986) who

argues that having a theory of mind only implies simulation skills. According to
this account, it is possible to infer other peoples intentions and therefore their ac-
tions by using ones own mind as a model of theirs. For example, it is possible to
anticipate the solution that somebody else will find to a problem by solving this
problem ourselves, while taking into account the differences in abilities that dif-
ferentiate us from the other person. This position does not imply the necessity of
possessing a complex device for mental state attribution, but only the ability for
pretence and taking another persons perspective.
Other researchers give yet another interpretation to the false belief task re-
sults. According to this third account, the transition between failure and success
at the task does not reflect a change of competence but rather of performance.
These researchers (Leslie 1994; Baron-Cohen 1995) think of theory of mind as
an innate mental module, present from birth. However, the modular theory does
not imply that this module is operational from birth or does not need any input
from the environment or the maturation of some processing skills in order to
develop. The main assumption behind this view is that the development of theory
of mind is a continuous process that does not undergo a radical transition during
the preschool years.
The most detailed example of modular decomposition of theory of mind
comes from the work of Baron-Cohen (1995) in the field of autism. Baron-Cohen
divides theory of mind into four sub-modules. From the most rudimentary to the
most sophisticated, these sub-modules are as follows.
The Intentionality Detector (ID) is the first precursor of the full-fledged theory
of mind module. This sub-module simply serves to pair a moving stimulus to a
potential agent. The data coming from this sub-module is interpreted in terms
of goals or desire. The second sub-module is the Eye-Direction Detector (EDD),
that operates only on the visual modality and constitutes a specialized part of
the human visual system. The role of this sub-module is threefold: first, it serves
to detect the presence of other eyes; second, it computes whether these eyes are
oriented towards it or towards something else; and third, it allows the subject to
infer that if another organisms eyes are oriented at one thing, then it sees this
thing. The first two sub-modules are developing from birth until about the age of
nine months. They only allow dyadic representations that can be formulated as:
[agent sees me].
It is around the age of nine months that the third sub-module, the Shared-
Attention Mechanism (SAM), starts to develop, to become fully operational
around the age of 18 months. Unlike the other two, this sub-module allows tri-
adic representations between the subject, an agent and another object. However
important this change may be with respect to the ID and EDD sub-modules, SAM
is however limited because it implies the necessity to check visually if an object re-
ally is part of the shared attention. The last sub-module called the Theory-of-Mind
Mechanism (ToMM) has two main functions. First, it enables the representation
of epistemic mental states such as pretending, knowing, believing, etc., since the
other three sub-modules only allowed the interpretation of a behavior in terms of
volition or perception. Second, the ToMM assembles all the information gathered
from the other sub-modules into a useful and functional theory.
All the models of theory of mind described above have their own merits and
have been corroborated by some kind of empirical validation. For instance, the
simulation model correctly predicts the early acquisition of pretend play in young
children, around the age of 18 months. Moreover, from a neuroscience perspec-
tive, the discovery of mirror neurons in the monkeys premotor cortex (for a
recent overview, see Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2008) has also given it strong sup-
port, especially since some experimental evidence seems to suggest that a similar
matching system also exists in humans (Gallese and Goldman 1998). From a cog-
nitive point of view, the simulation model is the only one which does not imply
that theory of mind abilities require the more general ability to form higher-order
representations or metarepresentations (see below), since it only rests on the abil-
ity to translate a representation and apply it to another person. However, this view
may be too simplistic, since new empirical evidence coming from brain imaging
studies (see Section 1.1.4 below) have confirmed the relation between metarepre-
sentational abilities and theory of mind.
The theory and modular models of theory of mind share the property of
anchoring theory of mind in the metarepresentational system of humans. The
general format of this metarepresentation can be formalized as follows: [agent
attitude proposition]. In the case of the Sally-Anne task for instance, the meta-
representation the child has to form would be: [Sally believes my marble is
in the basket]. This dissociation between the belief held by the agent and the
proposition it embeds has the advantage of showing that the proposition can be
false while the whole metarepresentation is true. In the case of the Sally-Anne
example, the proposition the marble is in the basket can be wrong if the marble
is in fact in the box. On the other hand, the whole metarepresentation Sally be-
lieves that the marble is in the basket is true if Sally really thinks that the marble
is in the basket.
Despite sharing this common property, the theory and modular models make
very different predictions regarding the childs developing theory of mind. While
. Mirror neurons are neurons which respond both when a particular action is performed by
a monkey and when the same action is performed by another individual and simply observed
by the monkey under investigation.
the theory model predicts that the child can only reason in terms of desire until
he develops a concept of belief around the age of four, the modular model pre-
dicts that this development follows a gradual process of maturation, and that the
possession of a full-fledged theory of mind has a number of precursors. Given
all empirical evidence available to date, it does seem indeed that theory of mind
abilities gradually develop from birth to early childhood, following a fixed devel-
opmental pattern. These developmental steps will be discussed in the next chap-
ter. Moreover, some new results coming from the field of neuroscience, and also
described in the next section, tend to confirm the modular basis of this ability.
Finally, the fact that autistic children are specifically impaired in the formation of
metarepresentations involving mental states (see Chapter 3) also argues in favor
of a dedicated mental module.
Even though the modular model seems to be the one best-suited to account
for the available data on theory of mind development, the alternative models are
not necessarily falsified by this data or even mutually-exclusive. In fact, a mod-
ular model could very well include a theoretical component. In Baron-Cohens
model for instance, the latest component of the module to develop, the Theory-
of-Mind Mechanism (ToMM), serves to relate all the information gathered by the
other sub-modules in a coherent theory. In this proposal, the full-fledged theory
of mind module therefore includes a theoretical component. However, contrary
to theory theory models that predict the replacement of one ability by another,
Baron-Cohen thinks that the precursors to a full-fledged theory of mind module
continue to function even when the more sophisticated ones are in place. Simi-
larly, it is quite plausible that theory of mind abilities do include a simulation
component. However, simulation alone cannot account for the range of abilities
which are covered by the term theory of mind, and that will be described in the
next chapter.
1.1.4 Arguments from the neuroscience of theory of mind
The existence of a modular system specifically dedicated to the processing of

other peoples mental states has found some recent confirmation in brain imag-
ing studies. According to Saxe and Baron-Cohen (2006:ii), in order to ascertain
the existence of a specific mechanism dedicated to the representation of beliefs,
apart from the general process of metarepresentation, it is necessary to identify a
cerebral area that fulfills at least three criteria:
1. a robust and replicable response to stories that do require belief attribution;
2. a significantly lower response to closely matched control stories that only re-
quire representing representations that do not involve mental states;
3. no difference among stories not involving mental states that do or do not

demand metarepresentation.
In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, Perner et al. (2006)
have identified a cerebral area that appears to match these criteria exactly: the
right temporo-parietal junction. Their results indicate that this area is active when
healthy adult subjects read simple stories bearing on some characters beliefs but
inactive when the stories bear on the physical representation of photographs or
when subjects read stories containing false direction signs. This is remarkable,
because signs are even more similar to beliefs than photographs. Just like beliefs,
they are supposed to represent the current reality and can therefore be false. On
the contrary, photographs are representations of reality at a certain time and can-
not be false. Lastly, the right temporo-parietal junction did not have a different
activation in the false direction condition and in the control condition that simply
enacted a temporal change. The difference between these two conditions is that
the false direction condition involves a metarepresentation whereas the control
condition does not. This difference indicates that the right temporo-parietal junc-
tion is not always active when subjects have to deal with metarepresentations but
is specifically dedicated to the representation of beliefs. On the other hand, in
this study, the left temporo-parietal junction was active in all tasks requiring the
formation of a metarepresentation.
In light of this data, it seems reasonable to conclude that the processing
of beliefs in the human brain really involves a specific area. However, it does
not mean that the right temporo-parietal junction is enough in itself to reason
about mental states. In fact, as various researchers have pointed out (for instance
Leslie and Thaiss 1992), success at the false belief task also requires the ability
to deal simultaneously with two representations of reality the real state of the
world and its representation in the head of another person and to inhibit an
incorrect but highly salient answer. All in all, it seems that the cognitive abilities
related to theory of mind require both general reasoning mechanisms as well
as specific treatment. This conclusion has been corroborated in a study by Saxe
et al. (2006), who also showed the presence of two processes in the treatment
of mental states, using fMRI techniques. More importantly, these authors have
confirmed that the specific treatment of mental states takes place in the right
temporo-parietal junction.
1.2 Theory of mind and theories of verbal communication
In the first part of this chapter, I have introduced the notion of theory of mind,
and discussed the various ways proposed in the literature to characterize this cog-
nitive ability. I will now explain why this notion has to be integrated in a model of
verbal communication.
1.2.1 The code model of communication
Until the second half of the twentieth century, one single model, called the code
model, was applied in linguistics to explain the processes underlying verbal commu-
nication. According to this model, which has been explicitly described by Shannon
and Weaver (1949), the process of communication consists in the transmission of a
message from a source to a destination via a communication channel. More specifi-
cally, in the domain of verbal communication, the speaker, representing the source,
encodes a message (the signified) and transmits it to an addressee by emitting a
signal (the signifier) transmitted through an oral or written channel. In this model,
there is simply no need to have theory of mind abilities in order to achieve success-
ful verbal communication, since all a hearer has to do to get a speakers meaning is
to decode it, based on some deterministic set of rules applied to the sentence form.
In linguistics, the code model of communication prevailed in structuralism
as well as in semiotics for a long time. It is notably what inspired Jakobsons work
on the functions of language (1963). But this vision of communication has also
gained predominance outside the field of linguistics, as demonstrated by the nu-
merous metaphors about communication used in everyday life such as to decode
a message or message received. Therefore, it seems that the code model of com-
munication corresponds to the common representation of communication held
by many speakers. Despite its usefulness in describing the way a speaker emits
symbols and how these symbols are transmitted to an addressee who can under-
stand them, this model also has a number of well-known shortcomings.
Its most fundamental problem comes from the fact that human languages are
not codes, in the sense that there is no bi-univocal relation between meaning and
form, both at the sentence and at the word level. In fact, most sentences contain
a number of elements that need contextual information to get their meaning. For
example, in (1) below, the actual referents of the pronoun he and the name Mary,
or the actual time point referred to by the adverb tomorrow can only be resolved
using contextual information.
(1) He says that Mary will come tomorrow.
Generally speaking, much recent work in pragmatics (for example Bach and
Harnish 1979; Sperber and Wilson 1986; Grice 1989; Davis 1991; Carston 2002)
has shown that most of the time the linguistic meaning contained in a sentence
gives only a partial and ambiguous clue to the speakers intended meaning.
A weaker version of the code model states that even though all elements of the
sentence meaning need not be encoded in order to be communicated, the speaker
could, if he wanted to, linguistically encode the exact content of his thought. In
short, the idea is that the speaker only encodes a part of his message for the sake
of convenience and not out of necessity. This point of view corresponds to what
has been called the augmented code model. However, the idea that all thoughts
can always be transmitted by utterances that transparently match their content is
also disputable. Without mentioning here the philosophical details of this debate
(see for instance Carston 2002), it seems reasonable to state that despite ones best
efforts to encode the content of ones thoughts as precisely as possible, there is
always a place for interpretation on the part of the hearer. For instance, legal texts
are designed to encode information in the most complete and precise way pos-
sible. However, all forms of ambiguity simply cannot be eliminated, as is regularly
shown by their diverging interpretations in law courts.
There is yet another problem with the code model. In a situation where the
code itself is not deficient, for instance if it isnt distorted by a noise preventing
the correct reception of the signal, all acts of verbal communication should neces-
sarily be successful. However, this is not the case, as can be seen in the numerous
misunderstandings occurring in communication.
All the problems encountered by the code model can be resolved by adding a
layer of inferential processes to the encoding and decoding processes.
1.2.2 Grices model of communication
The first person to emphasize the existence of inferential processes in verbal com-
munication was Grice (1957), in an article dedicated to meaning. The original-
ity of his proposal comes from the distinction between natural and non-natural
meaning. According to Grice, in order to understand the speakers meaning, the
hearer must understand his intention. However, an utterance does not naturally
mean the speakers intention, in the same way as the presence of smoke means
that there is fire somewhere. When we say that a speakers utterance means some-
thing, we say that he had the intention, by producing his utterance, to have a
certain effect on the hearer through the recognition of his intention. Therefore,
the notion of non-natural meaning requires a double level of intentionality. There
is first the intention to transmit a message and second the intention to fulfill the
intention to transmit this message because of its recognition by the hearer. The
addition of a second level of intentionality was one of Grices major innovations
and has been at the center of most models of pragmatics ever since.
In addition to introducing the concept of non-natural meaning, Grice also
put the notion of intention at the center of communication processes by showing
that understanding an utterance cannot be reduced to understanding the meaning
explicitly communicated without taking into account what is implicitly communi-
cated. This statement stems from the observation that meaning can sometimes be
implicitly communicated by an utterance without being logically deducible from
its content, what Grice called implicatures. Here is Grices schema for working out
conversational implicatures (Grice 1975:50):
1. He has said that p.
2. There is no reason to suppose that he is not observing the maxims, or at least
the cooperative principle.
3. He could not be doing this unless he thought that q.
4. He knows (and knows that I know that he knows) that I can see that the sup-
position that he thinks that q is required.
5. He has done nothing to stop me thinking that q.
6. He intends me to think, or is at least willing to allow me to think, that q.
7. And so he has implicated that q.
As can be seen from the above schema, the Gricean view of communication rests
to a large extent on the attribution of mental states, as shown by the recurrent use
of terms such as think, suppose and know. In other words, even though the notion
had not yet been coined at the time of his work, theory of mind abilities appear to
be at the heart of Grices theory of communication.
The Gricean account of communication encountered a number of objections.
The most important one from a theory of mind perspective is that it follows from
Grices account that both speaker and hearer must always be deeply involved in
mindreading in order to be able to communicate. More specifically, the speaker
has to metarepresent the thought he wants to communicate and the hearer must
metarepresent the intention of the speaker. However, postulating the necessity
to manipulate such complex metarepresentations in order to perform any act of
communication can be problematic. Gler and Pagin (2003) have for instance
criticized inferential models on this point. According to these authors, Grices
. Grice himself had, of course, no intention to produce a psychological theory of verbal com-
munication, and this remark should not be taken as a direct criticism of his work. It is only the
consequences of his model for modern pragmatic theories of verbal communication that are at
stake here.
theory of communication implies that only speakers able to manipulate metarep-

resentations should be able to speak at all. But some autistic subjects are able to
speak in the absence of a functional theory of mind (see Chapter 3). Gler and
Pagin consider this fact as a tangible proof that Grices theory of communication
is not tenable. However, as Reboul (2007) observes, if autistic subjects really were
unimpaired communicators, their communicative behavior should be undistin-
guishable from that of other speakers, but this is clearly not the case.
Wilson (2000) notes two other problems related to the metarepresentation of
mental states in Grices model of communication. The first one is related to the
Gricean conception of utterance interpretation, according to which, in order for
a speaker to be understood, his intention must not only be recognized but also be
transparent. This constraint implies de facto the formation of an infinite regres-
sion of metarepresentations. More specifically, in Grices model, in order to com-
municate a message, the speaker must have the following intentions:
1. intend to inform the speaker of something;
2. intend the hearer to recognize his informative intention;
3. intend the hearer to recognize that he has the intention to make him recog-
nize this intention;
4. intend the hearer to recognize that he has the intention that the hearer recog-
nizes that he has this intention;
5. etc. ad infinitum.
The problem is the following. In order for the speaker to communicate a message,
his informative intention, as well as all contextual hypotheses necessary for its
identification, must be mutually known. This hypothesis may seem theoretically
sound, but it creates a practical problem, because the infinite series of metarepre-
sentations presented above cannot be represented by the human mind.
The second problem noted by Wilson comes from the derivation of conver-
sational implicatures proposed by Grice, which requires some kind of conscious
reasoning on the part of the hearer. However, this reasoning seems quite complex
even for adults and it seems even more unlikely that young children could master
it when they start to use language for communication.
Finally, the Gricean approach to communication implies that the ability to
attribute mental states is not specific but similar to other general reasoning tasks.
In fact, observations based on certain pathologies seem to indicate that this is not
the case. For instance, subjects suffering from Williams syndrome possess good
linguistic and social abilities and do not have any problem to pass the false belief
test. In striking contrast, their general reasoning abilities are extremely limited
(Segal 1996). Conversely, subjects suffering from Asperger syndrome, a form of
high-functioning autism, are often incapable of passing the false belief test even
though they possess good reasoning abilities (Frith 1991).
In short, contrary to pragmatic theories based on a code model of communi-
cation such as speech act theory, it seems that the Gricean model would require
not too few but too many mindreading abilities, with the consequence that, in
the light of more recent experimental and theoretical development, appears to
be cognitively very implausible. It must therefore be revised in some important
respects in order to be compatible with the literature on theory of mind.
1.2.3 Relevance theory
Relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986) can be defined as an attempt to work
out in detail one of Grices maxims of conversation. Even though relevance theory
departs from Grices vision of communication on a number of fundamental is-
sues, the main point of convergence between the two models is the assumption
that communication (both verbal and non-verbal) requires the ability to attribute
mental states to others. Sperber and Wilson do not completely reject the idea that
communication requires a code model, but reassess its scope by the addition of
an inferential component. According to Sperber and Wilson, the code model only
accounts for the first phase of linguistic treatment of an utterance that provides
the hearer with the initial input, that is enriched through inferential processes in
order to obtain the speakers meaning.
Sperber and Wilson share Grices intuition that utterances create expectations
of relevance. However, they do not think it necessary to have a cooperation prin-
ciple as well as maxims of conversation in order to explain this phenomenon.
According to them, it is not necessary that speakers cooperate in Grices sense for
communication to be successful. The inferential component of communication is
explained by a single principle: the principle of relevance (see Wilson and Sperber
2004 for a recent introduction to the theory). This section is more specifically
dedicated to the presentation of those aspects of the theory that can serve to ex-
plain the interface between communication and theory of mind.
Firstly, even though Sperber and Wilson share a number of assumptions with
Grice regarding the inferential nature of verbal communication, the criticisms
addressed to Grice with respect to the role of theory of mind in his model do not
carry over to relevance theory. The main problem with Grices model of commu-
nication was the requirement that, in order to be conveyed, the speakers informa-
tive intention (as well as all contextual assumptions needed to identify it) had to be
mutually known, which created an infinite regression of metarepresentations. In
Sperber and Wilsons model, the speakers meaning does not have to be mutually
known but only mutually manifest to be conveyed. The difference between these
accounts comes from the fact that an assumption cannot be known without being
explicitly represented in the speakers mind. On the other hand, in order for an
assumption to be manifest to a speaker at a given time, it must only be inferred.
From a cognitive point of view, this model is therefore much more plausible, be-
cause it does not involve a regression of metarepresentations that cannot be dealt
with by the human mind.
Moreover, the kind of inferential processing involved in the course of ver-
bal comprehension is seen as flexible and variable depending on the situation.
Sperber (1994) discusses three increasingly complex strategies for verbal under-
standing in terms of mindreading abilities, which may correspond to stages in
pragmatic development.
The simplest strategy is called naive optimism. A hearer applying this strategy
will look for a meaning satisfying his expectations of relevance. If he finds one, he
will assume that it was the intended one and the interpretative process will stop. If
he does not, then he does not have further resources and communication will fail.
This strategy is good enough to achieve successful communication in many cases.
However, it does not enable the hearer to understand the speakers meaning if he
is not (in Sperbers terminology) both benevolent and competent.
Suppose that Peter comes home after stopping to buy some bread. Upon his
arrival, he finds Mary about to go out. The following exchange takes place:
(2) a. Peter: Where are you going?
b. Mary: We ran out of bread.
By replying (2b), Mary is both benevolent and competent, with respect to the
current state of her beliefs. In other words, she provides the utterance that will
enable Peter to understand her informative intention in the most economical way.
However, as Sperber notes, speakers cannot always be competent enough to know
for sure what is optimally relevant for their audience at a given time. In the case
of our example, Mary holds a false belief regarding the necessity to buy bread.
Hence, if Peter applies the strategy of naive optimism, he will not be able to in-
terpret Marys utterance. In his cognitive environment, Marys assertion is simply
wrong: he knows that there is enough bread, since he has just bought some. In
order to be able to reach the implicated conclusion in (3) below, he has to be able
to understand that Mary holds a false belief about the necessity to buy bread.
(3) Mary is going out to buy some bread.
This ability requires a higher degree of mindreading abilities. In the case of our
example, the metarepresentation of beliefs that is necessary to describe it can be
paraphrased as follows:
(4) Mary thinks that we ran out of bread.
The strategy that enables speakers to take into account the possible incompetence
of others is called cautious optimism. By applying this strategy, the addressee can
understand the speakers utterance, even if it is not literally true. Instead of tak-
ing the first interpretation he finds relevant and stop here, he can ask himself
what interpretation the speaker might have thought would be relevant enough
to him. This strategy can help to recover the speakers meaning in two situations
where nave optimism would have failed. The first one is accidental relevance. This
happens when the first interpretation that seems relevant enough is not the one
intended by the speaker. In that case, only a cautiously optimistic hearer would be
able to consider what the speaker might have expected to be relevant and revise
his first interpretation on that account, instead of just accepting it. The second
situation is accidental irrelevance. This happens when a speaker mistakenly com-
municates something wrong (as in the case of Example 2 above), something that
the hearer already knows or produces a slip of the tongue.
However, while a cautiously optimistic hearer can deal with a speakers in-
competence, his assumption of speakers benevolence might also lead him astray
in some cases. The strategy of sophisticated understanding precisely allows a hear-
er to deal with a speakers possible malevolence by enabling him to ask himself
what the speaker might have thought he would think was relevant enough. Lets
imagine for instance that Mary in our previous example lied about her reason for
going out. In order for Peter to understand that she is lying, he must be able to
deal with two layers of embedded thoughts, paraphrased in (5):
(5) Mary wants me to believe that she thinks we ran out of bread.
In other words, Peter must be able to understand that Mary wants him to believe
that she believes something. The strategy of sophisticated understanding enables
Peter to understand Marys utterance even if he knows that Mary knows that they
do not need bread. For instance, if Peter knows that Mary has seen the bread in
his bag and therefore knows that they do not need some more.
By integrating the possibility that a hearer may use different strategies in order
to understand the speakers meaning, Sperber resolves a major paradox arising from
Grices account. Applying the strategy of naive optimism does not require the abil-
ity to reason about mental states at all, which provides an explanation for the fact
that young children and autistic subjects can achieve successful communication in
many cases in the absence of a fully functional theory of mind. As for normal adult
speakers, the fact of having at their disposal a system of more sophisticated compre-
hension strategies enables them to deal with others incompetence and malevolence
when necessary, even though not all utterances require such skills.
1.2.4 A specialized sub-module of theory of mind dedicated

to verbal communication?
When they first developed relevance theory in the 1980s, Sperber and Wilson
adopted a Fodorian view of the modularity of mind and put forward the hypoth-
esis that pragmatic phenomena, being inferential by nature, had to be dealt with
by the central module. According to Fodor (1983), the mechanisms depending
on the central module could not be the subject of studies in cognitive science,
as stated in his first law on the non-existence of cognitive sciences: The more
global [] a cognitive process is, the less anybody understands it (1983:107).
Therefore, if pragmatic processes are indeed inferential and if a Fodorian view
of modularity is taken, it seems very improbable that pragmatic processes can be
studied from a cognitive perspective.
The Fodorian account has however been strongly criticized even within the
domain of cognitive sciences. The currently most widely accepted definition of
a mental module no longer corresponds to the characteristics formulated by
Fodor, such as high speed and inaccessibility to conscious introspection. The
widespread interest in evolutionary biology has considerably changed these
views. From this perspective, a module is defined as a specialized mechanism
that evolved from a biological adaptation that has captured the regularities of a
certain domain in order to deal with them more efficiently. A module can only
apply to input within this specific domain. This new conception of modularity of
mind (Cosmides and Tooby 1987) led to the idea that theory of mind could be a
dedicated mental module. The theory of mind module involves inferential pro-
cesses that can only be applied to decode an intentional behavior and provides
the same results that can be obtained through a general reasoning mechanism
while requiring less cognitive effort.
If there is indeed a specialized mental module dedicated to theory of mind
abilities, the question is whether this module also deals with the kind of infer-
ential processes related to verbal communication. According to Bloom (2002),
the theory of mind module is sufficient to account for the specificities of verbal
communication, and in particular there is no need for another device in order for
children to use their mindreading abilities for lexical acquisition (see Chapter 2).
Sperber and Wilson (2002) argue in favor of an even more modular view of the
theory of mind module and suggest that there may be a specialized sub-module of
theory of mind specifically dedicated to verbal communication. The justifications
given for the existence of such a module are the following.
According to Sperber and Wilson, the sub-module of theory of mind dedi-
cated to verbal communication works according to the principle of relevance.
They argue that the comprehension procedure (following a path of least effort
in accessing contextual information and enriching the linguistic meaning at the

explicit and implicit levels) meets the requirements of modularity because it may
be seen as a fast and frugal heuristic: a special-purpose inferential procedure jus-
tified by the regularity described in the Communicative Principle of Relevance
(Wilson 2005:1141). This procedure can provide reliable results only when it is
applied to the domain of ostensive-inferential communication.
To further justify their proposal, Sperber and Wilson emphasize the fact
that the number of non-communicative actions that an individual can realize at
a given time is very limited, which makes their interpretation relatively straight-
forward. On the other hand, the gap between the linguistic meaning of an ut-
terance and the speakers meaning is often wide and the variety of messages that
a communicator may want to convey by producing a given utterance is very
large. As a result, it seems difficult to explain how a general heuristic serving
to interpret non-communicative behaviors may be sufficient to deal with such
complex situations.
Sperber and Wilson also point out that pragmatics deals with overt commu-
nication. Following Grice, they argue that every act of ostensive-inferential com-
munication implies the recognition of a double level of intention: the speaker
must have the intention that the hearer believes that he has the intention to make
him believe a number of assumptions. This process requires a double embedding
of mental states, whereas a single level of metarepresentation is enough to decode
ordinary (non linguistic) actions. In spite of this complexity, children as young
as two years old can recognize and produce acts of overt communication while
being unable to pass a false belief test. This fact seems hard to explain if a specific
mechanism dedicated to verbal communication is not at play.
The last argument is that the procedure used to infer the intention behind
an ordinary action such as described by theory of mind models is not applicable
to ostensive-inferential communication. These models (for instance Davies and
Stone 1995; Carruthers and Smith 1996) describe a procedure consisting in first
identifying the effect that the agent might have predicted and desired by per-
forming his action, and then supposing that this effect has been intended by
this agent. This procedure cannot be applied to verbal communication, since
the effect intended by the speaker is precisely the recognition of his intention.
In order to be able to first identify a desirable effect, and then suppose it cor-
responds to the speakers meaning, the hearer should have a very precise idea
beforehand of what the speaker might have wanted to communicate. This is
sometimes the case (for instance in a question and answer pairs) but it isnt
necessarily so. The speaker can nevertheless understand an unexpected mes-
sage as well as an expected one. When the message is unexpected, the procedure
described above cannot be used and the success of communication must appeal
to another explanation.
This proposal, as well as the arguments presented to support it, are theoreti-
cally sound and provide answers to a number of previously unresolved questions.
However, ascertaining the existence of a specific sub-module of theory of mind
dedicated to verbal communication requires more empirical investigation. In
Wilsons words(2005:1141): although many aspects of relevance theory have
been experimentally tested, the arguments for a dedicated comprehension proce-
dure [] remain largely theoretical.
Another potential problem for this account is that until now, Sperber and
Wilson considered as ostensive stimuli both verbal and non verbal elements.
Therefore, ostensive-inferential communication based on the communicative
principle of relevance was not specifically dedicated to the verbal domain. It is
now necessary to define which kind of input has to be dealt with by the spe-
cialized sub-module proposed by Sperber and Wilson. If non-linguistic stimuli
are also included, the distinction between verbal and non-verbal communication
would be blurred and the necessity of a specialized mechanism dedicated to ver-
bal communication would lose all justification.
In conclusion, even though Sperber and Wilsons proposal is interesting and
promising in many respects, some further investigation remains necessary both
at a theoretical and an experimental level in order to get a sound evaluation of
its real import. I will discuss this again in the light of the empirical data on the
acquisition of French connectives presented in Chapter 6, and suggest it as a pos-
sible explanation for the early acquisition of epistemic uses of this connective.
1.3 Summary
In this chapter, some central aspects of the notion of theory of mind have been
defined. I have shown that theory of mind abilities were best thought of as a men-
tal module. I have however not excluded the possibility that alternative models of
theory of mind might also be partially integrated into a modular model. Notably,
I have defined pretence as an important precursor for this cognitive ability and
considered the possibility that full-fledged theory of mind abilities might include
a component of explicit reasoning, along the lines proposed by the defendants of
theoretic models of theory of mind. I have also stressed that the most commonly
used test to measure theory of mind abilities, the false belief task, had a number
of intrinsic limitations and should be complemented by other experimental tools.
This is an issue I will tackle in more detail in the next chapter.
The second part of the chapter has been dedicated to the potential points of
convergence between the cognitive notion of theory of mind and current models
of verbal communication. Even though the ability to reason about mental states
has become a widely recognized component of verbal communication since the
work of Grice, I have argued that Grices model in itself was in many ways inad-
equate to take account of new empirical findings within the domain of theory
of mind. On the other hand, relevance theory seems to offer the best model to
account for the role of theory of mind in verbal communication. One of the key
advantages of this framework comes from Sperbers proposal that communicators
may use several strategies to transmit and understand verbal messages. Finally, I
argued that the existence of a special sub-module of theory of mind dedicated to
verbal communication, while solving some theoretical problems, needed to be
further refined and tested before being fully integrated in a modular model of
theory of mind.
chapter 2
The co-acquisition of language

and theory of mind
This chapter addresses the developmental relations between language and theory
of mind. On the one hand, language is the primary tool that enables children to
talk and reason about mental states, and many researchers think that some lin-
guistic abilities are necessary for children to start developing a functional theory
of mind. On the other hand, numerous theoretical and empirical studies have
demonstrated that theory of mind abilities play an important role for language
acquisition, especially in the lexical and pragmatic domains. The main question
tackled in this chapter is whether and to what extent one domain may condition
the development of the other. A thorough review of the available evidence will
lead me to defend the thesis of a co-acquisition of these two cognitive abilities.
The discussion starts with a short summary of the main stages of language ac-
quisition (2.1) in order to compare them with the development of theory of mind
abilities, described in detail in the next section (2.2). The question of individual
differences in the pace of theory of mind development is also discussed and pos-
sible causes for them, genetic and environmental, are reviewed and analyzed.
The remainder of the chapter examines the possible relations between lan-
guage acquisition and theory of mind development. I will start by presenting the
acquisition of pragmatic abilities and argue that most of them are strongly related
to theory of mind (2.3.1). I will go on to discuss the potential influence of lan-
guage for the development of a functional theory of mind (2.3.2) before turning
to the alternative hypothesis and discussing the impact of theory of mind on lan-
guage acquisition (2.3.3).
In view of the evidence gathered throughout the chapter, I will flesh out a
mutual bootstrapping scenario, to account for the co-acquisition of language and
theory of mind abilities during the childs first years of life. The details of my hy-
pothesis will be explained in Section 2.3.4.
2.1 The main stages of language acquisition
One of the major goals for the study of language acquisition is to identify the
phases that children have to go through in the process of acquiring their mother
tongue. A recurrent finding in this domain is that children invariably go through
the same stages, independently of their mother tongue and even of the modality
used, oral or signed (Goldin-Meadow 2003). There are nevertheless some ma-
jor individual differences in the rhythm of acquisition, and a given stage can be
reached by two children with as much as a years difference without the slower one
being considered as language delayed (Pinker 1994:271).
Another well-documented phenomenon is the discrepancy between compre-
hension and production of a word or sentence. Most of the time, comprehension
precedes production by several months. However, the reverse phenomenon can
also occur, and has been documented for instance by Clark (2003) regarding the
use of articles. I will discuss this issue in more detail in Chapter 4 (Section 4.2.1).
Chapters 6 and 7, dedicated to the acquisition of French causal connectives, will
show that the first uses of these items often do not reflect a full comprehension of
their meaning either.
At a general level, the stages of language acquisition can be summarized as
follows. From birth to the age of one year, childrens linguistic development is
principally dedicated to the recognition and production of the sounds of their
mother tongue. This pre-linguistic development will enable children to produce
their first words around the age of one. However, the discrepancy between com-
prehension and production can already be observed at the lexical level. Bloom
(2000:35) reports experiments indicating that children understand about 15
words at the age of eight months, but this figure is of course very variable across
children. By comparing longitudinal studies conducted with children exposed to
different languages, Clark (1979) has noted a strong similarity between the se-
mantic content of childrens first words all around the world. Children start by
speaking of objects around them, of people they see frequently and of the toys
that they can manipulate. Their vocabulary, first limited to some dozens of words,
starts to grow very fast around the age of 18 months.
It is also between 18 and 24 months that childrens syntax starts to develop,
when they begin to produce two-word utterances. The content of these first ut-
terances is also remarkably similar across languages. They are, most of the time,
associated with a request or a question, but also with the description of a place or
an action as well as the negation of a state of affairs (Clark 2003:167). These con-
structions are already specific to childrens mother tongue. In about 95% of the
cases, the order between the two words is correct (Pinker 1994). For example, an
English-speaking child asking for a piece of cake will say want cake rather than
Chapter 2. The co-acquisition of language and theory of mind 29
the reverse, thus correctly placing the verb and its complement in his language.
In the syntactic domain too, childrens productive abilities do often not reflect
their comprehension level, as many experiments targeting comprehension have
revealed. For instance, in a well-known experiment, Hirsch-Pasek and Golinkoff
(1991) seated children speaking only in isolated words in front of two television
screens featuring two characters that were familiar to them: Big Bird and Cookie
Monster. In one screen, Cookie Monster was tickling Big Bird while in the other
Big Bird was tickling Cookie Monster. Children heard a voice saying: Oh look,
Big Bird is tickling Cookie Monster (or the reverse). Find Big Bird tickling
Cookie Monster. Children systematically looked longer at the screen that cor-
rectly depicted the sentence they heard, thus demonstrating that they understood
the meaning of the ordering between the subject, verb and object.
After the stage of two-word utterances, language acquisition starts to acceler-
ate. Between the end of their second year and the middle of their third year, the
sentences produced by children become much longer and more complex. During
this period, the acquisition process becomes so fast that it is almost impossible to
identify an exact order of acquisition between the structures.
At the lexical level, vocabulary growth keeps on accelerating: from 23 to 30
months, children learn on average 1.6 new words per day, which enables them
to produce about 600 words by the middle of their third year. This acceleration
continues for a long time during childhood to reach its peak between the ages of
8 and 10 years, when children acquire an average of 12.1 new words every day
(Bloom 2000). It is also around their second birthday that children start to pro-
duce functional words like articles, prepositions and connectives.
As far as syntax is concerned, this period is marked by the acquisition of the
majority of complex syntactic structures such as questions, negations, passives,
and more importantly from the point of view of connectives coordination and
subordination. This fast progression enables children to reach an almost adult-
like linguistic competence around the age of four years, even though the acquisi-
tion of some aspects of language continues throughout a persons life, especially
in the lexical domain.
It is also worth mentioning that the timing of language acquisition is de-
pendent on a number of biological and cognitive factors which account for the
one year delay between birth and the beginning of lexical production and the
additional six month delay before the first syntactic constructions appear. The
first important factor to take into account is brain maturation. As summarized
by Pinker (1994:288), head size and brain weight, as well as the thickness of the
cerebral cortex increase rapidly during the first year of life. Moreover, the number
of synapses also increases to reach a peak between the ages of nine months and
two years, depending on the brain area. It is therefore plausible that the brain has
to reach a minimal size and that a certain number of synapses have to develop in
order for the various stages of language acquisition to be reached. Amongst the
other factors conditioning the age of acquisition of the various linguistic abilities
are memory, attention and the development of the articulatory system. Lastly,
the hypothesis put forward in this book is that the acquisition of some aspects of
language, especially at the lexical level, are also strongly dependent on childrens
cognitive development, and more specifically their theory of mind abilities.
2.2 The development of theory of mind abilities
In the preceding chapter, I argued in favor of a modular approach to theory of

mind. From a developmental point of view, a major hypothesis shared by modu-
lar models of theory of mind is that this module develops gradually from birth,
until children reach adult-like competences many years later during childhood.
This view is opposed to the theory theory models of theory of mind which put
forward the idea that the transition between failure and success at the false belief
task reflects a major change in childrens cognition. According to this account,
children acquire a concept of belief around the age of four and do not have theory
of mind abilities before that. The modular approach to theory of mind predicts
on the contrary that a full-fledged theory of mind has a number of precursors. It
does not imply however that new abilities replace the preceding ones, but only
that new abilities serve to complement the older ones, which also continue to be
used. Moreover, a modular account does not exclude the possibility that these
precursors require some specific conditions in order to develop. In other words,
the modular view is not incompatible with the hypothesis that theory of mind
interacts with the environment in general and with the development of language
in particular.
This section presents the main milestones in the development of theory of
mind abilities in order to compare this development with the acquisition of lan-
guage and pragmatics in the next section.
2.2.1 The main stages of theory of mind development
As is the case for language, all children invariably go through the same stages in
the development of their theory of mind abilities, despite some important indi-
vidual differences between the children in the pace of development.
2.2.1.1 Very young children (018 months)

Until recently, very few studies had focused on children younger than 18 months.
However, according to Baron-Cohens modular model, two of the four sub-
modules of theory of mind are in place at around nine months. By that age, chil-
dren are able to detect a certain form of intentionality with their Intentionality
Detector (ID). More precisely, they can associate a moving stimulus with a po-
tential agent. Children are also able to detect the gaze direction of an agent, with
their Eye-Direction Detector (EDD) module. Despite the development of these
first rudimentary modules, theory of mind abilities of children younger than 18
months have long been considered to be quite limited.
In a recent study, Onishi and Baillargeon (2005) have, however, devised an
experiment that appears to indicate that 15-month-old babies are already able to
understand the concept of false belief. The experiment consists in showing babies
a series of small scenes in which the experimenter hides a toy in one of two boxes
displayed in front of them. In a second phase of the experiment, a change occurs,
for instance one of the boxes moves to another location or the object is moved
from one box to another. This change implies that the experimenter holds either a
true or a false belief about the place where the object is, depending on whether he
saw the displacement or not. According to the authors, babies should be surprised
and therefore look longer when the experimenter acts in an unexpected way. For
instance, in a situation where the experimenter knows that the object has moved
from one box to the other (he has seen the change occur) but is nevertheless look-
ing for the object in the wrong box. This is exactly what the results obtained in
this experiment have shown. Onishi and Baillargeon conclude that babies at the
age of 15 months already possess at least a rudimentary form of implicit theory
of mind abilities. They also argue that these results give strong support to the idea
that children are born with a specialized system for the detection of beliefs guid-
ing their interpretation of others behavior.
Perner and Ruffman (2005) have disputed Onishi and Baillargeons conclu-
sions and argued that their results could have other explanations. They suggest
two different ways to interpret them. The first one bears on neuronal activation
as babies process the events of the non verbal false belief task. More precisely,
they suggest that babies create three-way [agent-object-place] associations. Let
us imagine that during the familiarization phase, the child last sees the object
placed in the yellow box. His neurons will remember this information and if it is
still sustained during the test stimuli, this test combination will need less process-
ing and therefore a shorter looking time than a new combination of elements.
This explanation does not require any attribution of mental states on the part of
the babies. The experimenter might well have involuntarily done something just
as interesting for the baby with one of the boxes, leading to the same pattern of
differential looking time. The second explanation given by Perner and Ruffman
appeals to behavioral rules. According to this explanation, babies would indeed
expect the experimenter to behave in a particular way. The idea is that babies
could have noticed that a person will look for an object where she has last seen
it, or even have an innate genetic predisposition in this respect. However, babies
might well understand this rule without knowing that the mind acts as a media-
tor between the fact of seeing and that of acting, and therefore without attributing
false beliefs to the experimenter.
In a similar experiment conducted with 13-month-old babies, Surian, Caldi
and Sperber (2007) have tried to address the criticisms articulated by Perner and
Ruffman. In their experimental design, children were presented with two objects
and two relevant locations. Therefore, their behavior could not be explained by
their having formed a three-way agent-object-place association. These authors
also made sure to vary the order in which they placed the two objects behind
screens, which ruled out the possibility that childrens looking time was due to the
putative expectation that agents will focus their attention on the object that they
saw last. Despite these methodological differences, they also found (by measuring
looking time) that babies expected the experimenter to search efficiently for an
object only when they had had access to the relevant information.
In conclusion, the indirect comprehension measures used in these experi-
ments tend to indicate that children may already possess an implicit form of false
belief understanding shortly after the age of one year.
2.2.1.2 18 months
In Baron-Cohens modular model, it is at around 18 months that the Shared-
Attention Mechanism (SAM) is in place. The ability to share ones attention with
another speaker represents an important qualitative change in the childrens
cognitive environment and plays a fundamental role in lexical acquisition. Two
experiments by Baldwin (1991, 1993) have shown that by the age of 18 months,
children use the gaze direction of the experimenter as a clue for attributing a
meaning to an unknown word. In these experiments, children play with an un-
known object and hear the experimenter say a word that does not exist in their
language, for instance modi or peri in English. Results indicate that children as-
sociate this word with the object that the experimenter was looking at when
he pronounced it rather than the object they were playing with. This ability is
probably related to the sudden vocabulary spurt experienced by many children
around the age of 18 months.
Important changes also occur around 18 months in childrens understanding
of the notions of goal and desire. Meltzoff (1995) has tested whether 18-month-
old children were able to repeat an action performed by an adult or an action that
the adult had unsuccessfully tried to perform. Results indicate that by that age,
children are able to infer the adults intention through his failed action and to imi-
tate not the failed action but the one that should have been performed in order to
succeed, thus demonstrating an ability to understand the goal behind an action.
Another study that is relevant here was conducted by Repacholi and Gopnick
(1997) with 18-month-old children. These authors asked children to choose be-
tween biscuits and broccoli. For most of the children, biscuits are very tempting but
they refuse to touch broccoli. In the first phase of the experiment, children see the
experimenter display a preference for broccoli over biscuits by explicit comments
and gestures. Later on, the experimenter asks children to give him something to
eat. The majority of children below 18 months gave him the biscuits whereas most
of the children aged 18 months gave him the broccoli. These results seem to indi-
cate that by 18 months, children understand that food preferences are subjective.
2.2.1.3 From 18 months to 3 years

During this period, children acquire two important concepts for the development
of their theory of mind: pretence and desire.
Pretend play typically appears shortly after the age of 18 months. Leslie (1994)
ran a series of experiments showing that children aged between 26 and 36 months
are not only able to pretend but also to understand that other people are pretend-
ing. In his experiments, the experimenter gives children an empty bottle and asks
them to fill up two cups in front of them. Then the experimenter pretends to
empty one of the cups by turning it over and shaking it. The children are asked
which of the two cups is empty (in reality both are empty). All the children tested
indicated the cup which the experimenter had pretended to empty.
Around the same age, children also acquire a sophisticated understanding of
the notion of desire as well as the emotional consequences related to this feeling.
For instance, Perner (1999) describes a series of experiments showing that three-
year-old children understand that a person will feel happier if she obtains what
she wants than if she doesnt.
These important changes in childrens cognition are also reflected in their vo-
cabulary. By their second birthday, children start using volitional mental terms
such as want or perceptive verbs such as see (Bartsch and Wellman 1995; see also
Chapter 4, Section 4.2.2).
2.2.1.4 From 3 to 6 years

The period between three and six years is probably the most commonly studied in
relation to theory of mind, because it includes the transition between failure and
success at the classical versions of the false belief task (Wimmer and Perner 1983;
Baron-Cohen et al. 1985).
However, there is a crucial distinction to be made between the ability to un-

derstand false beliefs explicitly or implicitly. The classical false belief task requires
an explicit attribution of beliefs in order to answer the test question correctly,
and this ability is not in place before the age of four. However, some studies have
found that three-year-olds, while giving the wrong answer to the test question,
were looking at the correct location, that is where the character was indeed go-
ing to look for the object in view of his false belief (Clements and Perner 1994;
Ruffman et al. 2001). This result tends to indicate that three-year-old children
possess an implicit understanding of false belief. This finding has however not
been replicated with two-and-a-half-year-olds (Clements and Perner 1994).
Attributing false beliefs to someone also requires the ability to understand
that things can be different from what they appear to be. This ability has also
been regularly tested as an indicator of theory of mind development. The most
commonly used procedure is a test called the appearance-reality task, devel-
oped by Flavell et al. (1983). First, children are presented with an object look-
ing like another object, for example a stone that resembles an egg, or a sponge
that resembles a stone. The children are asked what the object in front of them
looks like, and then the experimenter tells them about its real nature. After this
presentation phase, children are asked a question regarding the appearance of
the tested object. For instance, what it looks like, if it is like a stone or a sponge,
etc. Then children are asked a question regarding the objects true nature, for
example what the object really is. Just like the false belief task, children succeed
at the appearance-reality task around the age of four.
Lastly, the attribution of a false belief requires the ability to understand that
seeing something leads to believing something. It is around the age of three years
that children understand this reality (Pratt and Bryant 1990). However, at that
age, they do not understand yet that other modalities than perceptual access can
be a source of beliefs. An experiment by Sodian and Wimmer (1987) has shown
that it is only by the age of six years that children know that it is possible to form
beliefs on the basis of an inference. In one of the experimental conditions, the
child and an adult see the contents of a container that only contains one type of
objects (balls of a single color). Then only the child sees the experimenter transfer
one of the objects from the container to an opaque bag. In a third phase, the adult
is informed in front of the child that the opaque bag contains an object taken from
the container. The child must be able to deduce by inference that the adult knows
what the bag contains. However, only six-year-old children pass the test. Younger
children always reply that the adult does not know. The notion of source of belief
will be discussed again in more detail in Chapter 4, in relation to the acquisition
of evidential markers (Section 4.2.4).
2.2.1.5 After 6 years

As was the case with very young children, few studies have investigated the abili-
ties of children older than six years, even though at that age they do not yet pos-
sess a theory of mind totally comparable to that of adults.
It is between the age of six and eight years that children are able to pass ad-
vanced versions of the false belief task, requiring a double embedding of men-
tal states. In the classical version of this test (Perner and Wimmer 1985), John
wrongly believes that Mary believes that the ice-cream van is located somewhere.
In order to succeed at the task, children must be able to reason about the be-
liefs that a person entertains about the beliefs of another person. Because of this
double recursion, this task is also often called second-order theory of mind task.
Success at this task is often correlated with the acquisition of some communica-
tive skills, such as the ability to distinguish lies from jokes. This aspect of the task
as well as its precise scenario will be detailed in Chapter 7 (Section 7.3).
Another mentalizing ability acquired only late by children is the concept of
a promise. In an experiment by Mant and Perner (1988), five and ten-year-old
children are told the following story.
A boy tells his friend that he will go swimming and she regrets that she wont be
able to go with him because she has to help her mother at home. Later on, the boy
decides to stay at home. The girl finds out that her mother doesnt need her and
she goes to the pool, where she is alone and disappointed.
Children up to the age of nine think that the boy was naughty for not having gone
to the pool. They seem to consider that the simple fact of saying that one wants to
do something implies a form of commitment to do it.
Another late-acquired ability is introspection, as illustrated in a study by
Flavell et al. (1995). In this experiment, a group of five-year-olds and another
group of eight-year-olds were made to sit for 20 seconds on a special chair, where
they were instructed to think about nothing. Once they left the chair, the ex-
perimenter asked them if they had had thoughts. Only eight-year-old children
acknowledged the impossibility of repressing thoughts.
2.2.2 What do the developmental stages of theory of mind tell us

about the nature of this cognitive ability?
The picture described above clearly shows that the development of theory of mind
abilities in children takes place over a much longer period than the one usually
considered in studies focusing on the false belief task. In view of this data, it seems
that the abilities related to the possession of a theory of mind encompass a whole
array of more or less complex domains. If the most rudimentary ones are in place
shortly after birth, the more complex ones are mastered only late during child-
hood. From a theoretical perspective, this global picture tends to argue strongly
in favor of a modular model of theory of mind. Indeed, the presence of some
abilities in babies as well as the gradual development of others over a long period
is perfectly compatible with the idea of an innate mental module that needs some
interaction with its environment in order to become fully operational. On the
other hand, the theory theory models, which focus on the transition correspond-
ing to the acquisition of the concept of belief, seem to be too limited to explain
this array of phenomena. Similarly, all the abilities described above do not seem
to be reducible to a simple mechanism of pretence.
The data reviewed above also show the importance of making a distinction
between the kind of explicit mindreading abilities required to succeed at the false
belief task and childrens implicit understanding of beliefs. This distinction first
became noticeable when some studies (Clements and Perner 1994) found a dis-
crepancy between the age of success at the false belief task (around age four) and
the age when children start to direct their gaze towards the correct location while
giving the wrong answer (around age three).
The importance of the distinction between explicit and implicit mentalizing
abilities has also found confirmation in the field of autism. A study by Ruffman
et al. (2001) has shown that autistic subjects mentalizing difficulties were mostly
found in the non-verbal domain. In this study, autistic children got similar results
as children with moderate learning difficulties in verbal theory of mind tasks, but
had clearly inferior scores when the measure was gaze direction. Frith (1989:94
95) also notes that it is probably through the mediation of language that some
autistic children can develop a limited form of theory of mind abilities.
Another recently discovered form of implicit understanding of beliefs comes
from the work of Onishi and Baillargeon (2005) and Surian et al. (2007) with 13
and 15-month-old babies. A major difference between these studies and the one
by Clements and Perner is the role of language in the task. In the latter, only the
childrens reaction did not include a linguistic component, in the former the entire
task was nonverbal. A possible interpretation of these new studies with babies is
that children do actually have a full understanding of beliefs shortly after birth but
that their failure at the classical versions of the task is solely due to their linguis-
tic and explicit reasoning limitations. An alternative hypothesis is that childrens
surprise, as measured by their looking time, does not reflect a full understanding
of beliefs as measured by the false belief task but a more rudimentary ability to
interpret behavior.
If babies really do have an incipient knowledge of false belief, then the ques-
tion is: what other abilities may develop later to enable them to succeed at the
false belief task around the age of four? Surian et al. (2007:585) suggest that it
is the ability [to] deploy conscious metacognitive inferences or to articulate a

conception of beliefs as truth evaluable mental states. This conclusion builds on a
distinction introduced by Sperber (1997), who has divided human metarepresen-
tational abilities into three categories, depending on the kind of metarepresented
content: thoughts, utterances and propositions. The idea is that mindreading
abilities bear on the ability to reason about thoughts, while metacommunicative
or pragmatic abilities are more specifically devoted to the treatment of linguistic
utterances. The third kind of metarepresentational ability discussed by Sperber is
the metalogical or argumentative ability, which enables humans to metarepresent
propositions in the abstract and assess their truth or falsity. According to Mascaro
and Sperber (2009), this ability is part of the more general ability of epistemic
vigilance that enables subjects to defend themselves against mistakes or deliberate
deception by other communicators. In the authors view, it is precisely this third
kind of metarepresentational ability that develops later than the other two and
enables children to pass false belief tests.
The analysis of human metarepresentational abilities as belonging to several
specific sub-domains is certainly a necessary step in the definition of a modular
model of theory of mind and it helps to account for the early onset of inferential
abilities in verbal communication (see Chapter 1, Section 1.2.4). However, this
cannot be the whole story, because there is a recurrent one year discrepancy be-
tween childrens first spontaneous productions of verbs of intention and volition
(around age two) and mental state terms like think and know (around age three).
If children really had fully operational metacognitive abilities in place from birth,
no such difference would be expected.
A more conservative explanation of babies behavior is that it reflects, as
Onishi and Baillargeon admit themselves in their conclusions, only a more rudi-
mentary understanding of false belief than is demonstrated in the classical version
of the task. However, the authors do not venture to make any hypothesis regard-
ing the kind of rudimentary abilities that could be involved. One possible solution
is to think of it in terms of behavior reading, as Povinelli and Vonk (2004) have
suggested regarding primates abilities to perform certain kinds of mentalistic
tasks (see de Villiers 2007:18623 or Reboul 2007:154158 for reviews of this
proposal). All in all, further theoretical and empirical findings are certainly neces-
sary in order to evaluate these proposals. But whatever the correct answer to this
puzzle might be, both the proposals reviewed above are by definition compatible
with a modular model of theory of mind, and the general framework defended in
this book consequently belongs within the theoretical framework emerging from
the most recent empirical findings.
2.2.3 Individual differences in theory of mind development
As is the case for language, the developmental pace of theory of mind abilities
varies from one individual to another. Even if the age of success at the classical
version of the false belief task is usually set at four years, some normally devel-
oping children already succeed at three while others fail until the age of five. It
is therefore important to investigate the causes of these individual differences
in order to find out whether they stem from genetic factors or from the childs
environment.
A recent study by Hughes et al. (2005) has addressed this issue by testing
the differences in theory of mind development between more than a thousand
pairs of monozygotic and dizygotic twins. Testing twins is particularly informa-
tive because although both types of twins (monozygotic and dizygotic) share
to a large extent the same environment, only monozygotic twins share all their
genetic material. Dizygotic twins, just like all brothers and sisters, share on av-
erage only half of this material. If the development of theory of mind abilities
is strongly related to genetic factors, then monozygotic twins should exhibit a
much stronger correlation than dizygotic twins. Conversely, a stronger influence
of the environment can be inferred if the correlation found for monozygotic
twins is less than twice as strong as that for dizygotic twins. Hughes et al. found
that the main factors influencing theory of mind development are environmen-
tal and not genetic. Two kinds of environmental factors accounted for most of
the variance: the socioeconomic level of the families and the childs interactions
with other members of the family.
Other studies had already highlighted the role of socio-economic status for
theory of mind development (Shatz et al. 2003) as well as the positive influence
of an older sibling on childrens development of mindreading abilities (Ruffman
et al. 1998). The importance of environmental factors has also been highlighted
in studies analyzing the influence of the childs interactions with his mother. For
instance, Peterson and Slaughter (2003) have shown that children whose mother
often gives explanations in terms of mental states are faster at developing mind-
reading abilities. Finally, some studies seem to indicate that cultural differences
might influence this acquisition, especially when they involve linguistic variations
in the way beliefs are communicated. However, this last argument is disputable, as
I will argue later on (see 2.3.2).
It is also interesting to note that the two types of environmental factors found
in Hughes et al.s study are strongly correlated. More precisely, it seems that the
quantity of linguistic information that a child gets is dependent on his familys so-
cioeconomic status. Hughes et al. (2005) quote several studies indicating that ver-
bal exchanges are much reduced in families of low socio-economic background.
In short, the studies reviewed in this section tend to indicate that the childs
environment plays a major role in the development of his theory of mind abilities.
However, it would be erroneous to conclude that theory of mind does not have
any genetic basis. The strong correlation between autism and a theory of mind
deficit provides some evidence for this relation. Indeed, as I will show in the next
chapter, autism has a strong genetic component. It seems therefore reasonable
to conclude that the theory of minds module has a genetic basis but that envi-
ronmental factors play an important role in its development. In other words, the
developmental time course of this innate module is conditioned by certain factors
in the childs environment.
2.3 Interdependence of language and theory of mind
Theory of mind abilities at least at the explicit level are strongly anchored in
language. As Hughes et al.s study (2005) with twins (reviewed above) shows, there
is a strong correlation between the development of these two cognitive faculties.
Notably, the rare genetic factors found to influence theory of mind development
in this study are also those accounting for individual differences in language
abilities. Moreover, a study conducted by Happ (1995) with autistic subjects has
stressed the role of verbal age, rather than chronological age or IQ, as the main
predicting factor for success at the false belief task.
As argued in Chapter 1, pragmatic abilities are a major point of convergence
between language and theory of mind. In this section, I will first define briefly the
notion of pragmatic competence from a developmental perspective and show that
studies bearing on the acquisition of these competences bring new arguments in
favor of a link between pragmatics and theory of mind. I will go on to discuss the
question of the interdependence between language and theory of mind develop-
ment, focusing more precisely on the question of the direction of this causal rela-
tion: does language acquisition enable theory of mind development or are some
cognitive abilities related to theory of mind necessary for language acquisition
to take place? I will start by reviewing the arguments in favor of the influence of
language on theory of mind (2.3.2) before exploring the opposite hypothesis, that
is the influence of theory of mind on language acquisition (2.3.3). In conclusion,
I will argue in favor of a more nuanced answer to this question, and propose a
model of acquisition based on a mutual influence and co-acquisition between
these cognitive abilities (2.3.4).
2.3.1 Pragmatic competence: Between language and theory of mind
In the developmental literature, the term pragmatic competence is used to account

for a number of abilities. For example, Ninio and Snow (1996:11) suggest group-
ing these abilities into a number of categories reproduced below.
1. The acquisition of communicative intents and the development of their lin-
guistic expression, including the conduct of communication prior to the
emergence of speech that is by vocalizations and gestures.
2. The development of conversational skills and the acquisition of rules that
govern turn-taking, interruptions, back channeling, signaling topic relevance
or topic shift and so on.
3. The development of control over the linguistic devices used to organize dis-
course in ways that are cohesive and genre specific.
4. Pragmatic learning processes that operate in childrens entry into language,
such as the acquisition of novel linguistic forms by pairing them with their
inferred communicative function rather than their semantic meaning.
5. The acquisition of rules of politeness and other culturally determined rules
for using speech.
6. The operation of pragmatic factors in the acquisition of deictic forms, such as
pronouns and deictic locatives.
The crucial point from the perspective of this book is that a link with theory of
mind abilities can be established more or less directly for all these categories. The
first category explicitly mentions the recognition of the speakers communica-
tive intention, which is in itself intrinsically dependant on the ability to attribute
mental states, as argued in Chapter 1. The acquisition of conversational skills,
mentioned in category 2 and more or less indirectly in categories 3 and 6, also
implies a form of mentalizing ability. For example, in order to be able to adapt to
ones audience, it is necessary to take into account their knowledge and beliefs.
Even some socially determined competences like politeness (category 5) are not
unrelated to theory of mind. In fact, rules of politeness vary depending on context
and the kind of addressees that are present. The ability to identify the appropriate
level of politeness requires a certain amount of mindreading abilities. The abilities
grouped under category 4 are also related to theory of mind, since some complex
speech-acts like promising require advanced mentalizing skills.
. In fact, Ninio and Snows list includes a seventh point: the pragmatic factors influencing
language acquisition, such as the context of interactions during childhood and the role of moth-
ers. I chose not to mention it here because it does not actually refer to a pragmatic ability.
Many of the empirical studies that have assessed the link between theory of
mind abilities and pragmatic competence have used the framework of relevance
theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986). One of the best-known studies in this respect
has been conducted by Happ (1993) to assess the correlations between autistic
childrens ability to understand metaphors and irony and their success at first and
second-order false belief tasks. Within the framework of relevance theory, meta-
phorical utterances are described as expressing a thought about a state of affairs
whereas ironical utterance express a thought about another thought. It follows
directly from this analysis that understanding irony should require a higher order
of mindreading ability than metaphor. Happ has therefore made the hypothesis
that understanding metaphors should require first-order mindreading abilities, as
tested for instance by the Sally-Anne task, since it requires the ability to go beyond
the literal sentence meaning to access the speakers meaning. The understanding
of irony should in turn be correlated with success at advanced or second-order
mindreading tasks. Her experimental results confirmed these two correlations.
However, Happs interpretation runs into a number of difficulties as pointed
out for instance by Wilson (forthcoming). One of these difficulties comes from
the prediction that only the subjects who pass standard first-order false belief
tasks should be able to go beyond the decoded sentence meaning and understand
the speakers meaning. In fact, it seems that children are able to recognize the
speakers referential intention long before they can pass the false belief task, for
example when the task involves lexical acquisition (for example Baldwin 1993;
Bloom 2000; Happ and Loth 2002). Besides, most sentences contain some kind
of ambiguity that needs to be resolved by looking beyond the decoded meaning
(reference resolution, etc.), and children appear to understand these sentences
from a very early age.
One possible explanation, in line with the relevance theoretic view of meta-
phor, is that metaphor understanding does not in fact require a specific kind of
treatment with respect to other utterances. First, some studies have shown that
not all kinds of metaphor require false belief understanding (Langdon et al. 2002;
Martin and McDonald 2004; Norbury 2005). Therefore, as Wilson points out, it
is possible that the correlation found by Happ between success at the false belief
task and metaphor comprehension may be due to the development of another
kind of metarepresentational ability defined by Sperber, the metalogical ability
that enables humans to assess a proposition as true or false. In her words: it seems
reasonable to assume that what standard first-order false-belief tasks directly re-
veal is not in general the state of the mindreading ability (which has been present
all along), but the current state of development of the metalogical ability.
Whatever the correct explanation for the correlation between first-order theo-
ry of mind tasks and metaphor is, the difference between metaphor and irony as
predicted by relevance theory but not by traditional Gricean accounts seems to

be correct. The correlation between irony and second-order theory of mind tasks
is much more robust and has been replicated many times with different condi-
tions like autism, Asperger syndrome, schizophrenia and right-hemisphere dam-
age (Winner et al. 1998; McDonald 1999, 2000; Dennis et al. 2001; Langdon et
al. 2002). From a developmental point of view, it is also worth mentioning that
children understand and produce metaphors several years before irony (Winner
1988). Besides, correlations have also been found between the ability to understand
irony and other complex mentalizing skills such as lies and deception (Winner and
Leekam 1991; Sullivan, Winner and Hopfield 1995; Winner et al. 1998).
The example of figurative uses of language is the one most often quoted to
corroborate the link between pragmatics and theory of mind. However, the cor-
relation between performance in the classical version of the false belief task and
performance in other tasks has also been found in many other cases. For example,
autistic children who fail false belief tests also have great difficulties in recognizing
when a Gricean maxim has been flouted. On the other hand, those of these chil-
dren who pass these tests do not have the same difficulties (Surian et al. 1996).
The same criterion also applies in reference disambiguation. Bezuidenhout
and Sroda (1998) showed children a ball and asked them to put the ball in the
box. In this test situation, the children in fact had two boxes in front of them. The
most salient one for the children was not visible to the experimenter, whereas the
less salient one was visible from both the childrens and the experimenters point
of view. Up to the age of four, children mostly choose the most salient box from
their perspective. Again the transition between failure and success for this task
coincides with the age of success at the false belief task.
In conclusion, the acquisition of pragmatic abilities is achieved over a long
period of time. Some rudimentary communicative skills such as proto-declarative
pointing are in place by the age of one. By the age of three years, children are able
to reliably identify the illocutionary force of some speech acts such as requests.
However, their repertoire of speech acts continues to develop until late child-
hood, at least for the most complex ones such as promising. In this section, I have
stressed that many of the milestones in the acquisition of pragmatic skills are
related to the development of childrens mentalizing abilities.
2.3.2 The role of language in theory of mind development
In the literature about theory of mind, numerous works are dedicated to the ques-
tion of the role of language for the development of this cognitive faculty. These
works belong to two different trends of thought: some argue for an influence of
language as a whole while others make more specific predictions regarding the
type of linguistic skills that could specifically influence theory of mind develop-
ment. I will present them in turn, starting with the more general ones (2.3.2.1)
and continuing with the more specific ones (2.3.2.2). Lastly, I will show that these
two types of arguments reflect two different views about the nature of the relation
between language and theory of mind, and argue that the study of adult aphasics
can bring decisive data to this debate (2.3.2.3).
2.3.2.1 Language as a trigger for theory of mind abilities

The arguments usually presented in defense of the idea that language determines
theory of mind development are of three kinds: the theory of mind abilities of
children with an abnormal development of language, the differences of linguistic
input depending on childrens environment and the differences in theory of mind
development depending on childrens mother tongue.
In the domain of abnormal language acquisition, studies are usually dedicat-
ed to children who, while not suffering from some kind of cognitive impairment,
do not have normal access to language during their first years of life. The children
best matching this definition are deaf children born of hearing parents. Peterson
and Siegal (2000) summarize eleven studies indicating that these children suffer
from an important delay in theory of mind development. In fact, it is only around
the age of 13 to 16 that the proportion of these children passing the false belief
task corresponds to that of normal four year-olds.
Peterson and Siegal also note an important difference in the results obtained
in the false belief tasks among different categories of deaf children, depending on
their exposure to language during their preschool years. Depending on this vari-
able, they divide deaf children into three different categories. First, children of
signing deaf parents and those who have a native speaker of sign language in their
immediate household. Second, orally trained deaf children who, with the help of
hearing aids, have been taught to speak and comprehend spoken language. Third,
children who acquire sign language in school after a period of conversational
deprivation in a family with no fluent signing member. Children from the first
category are not delayed in theory of mind tasks. This fact excludes the possibil-
ity that a deficit in the other categories of deaf children is exclusively due to their
handicap. The other two groups precisely suffer from an important delay in the
development of theory of mind abilities. These results provide a strong argument
in favor of the role of language for the development of theory of mind.
The influence of environmental factors has repeatedly been put forward to
explain the development of theory of mind abilities. The important point is that
all environmental factors discussed above are related to the exposure to language.
For instance, the presence of an older sibling in the family implies an important
form of linguistic stimulation for the younger child. The importance of the inter-
actions with the mother, and her preference for explanations in terms of mental
states, reveals even more explicitly the importance of linguistic input.
Lastly, the third argument invoked to stress the importance of language for
theory of mind abilities comes from studies bearing on variations that depend on
the specific language spoken by the children. One such study has been conducted
by Vinden (1996), who analyzed theory of mind development in Peruvian chil-
dren speaking Junn Quechua. The peculiarity of this dialect of Quechua is that
it does not include a specific linguistic form to communicate about mental states.
For instance, verbs such as think and believe do not have an exact equivalent in
Junn Quechua and they have to be translated by an equivalent of the verb say. Ex-
periments conducted with children from the age of four to eight years show that
the rate of success at the false belief task is significantly lower than the occidental
average, independently of the age of the children. These results therefore seem to
indicate that childrens mother tongue plays a fundamental role in the develop-
ment of their theory of mind.
A more general conclusion that could be drawn in view of this data is that
theory of mind development essentially rests on the acquisition of some specific
linguistic concepts. However, this conclusion is not borne out. It is undeniable
that the possibility of speaking directly about ones mental states can influence
the ability to succeed at a false belief task. Correlations between the ability to use
mental state verbs and success at the false belief task have for example been dem-
onstrated in several conditions such as autism, Asperger syndrome and specific
language impairment (Ziatas et al. 1998). However, it does not follow logically
that children whose language does not have mental state verbs should be cogni-
tively impaired in the development of their theory of mind. In her study, Vinden
had also administered another measure of mentalizing abilities to the children:
appearance-reality tasks. The results obtained for these tasks did not reveal any
significant delay. This seems to indicate that, contrary to Vindens own conclu-
sions, childrens failure at the false belief task is not due to real mentalizing im-
pairment but rather to a specific problem related to the cultural adaptation of the
false belief task.
Moreover, other studies with populations from non Occidental cultures tend
to invalidate the claim of a language-specific aspect of theory of mind develop-
ment. For instance, a study by Avis and Harris (1991) with the Baka tribe in Cam-
eroun did not report any delay in theory of mind development for these children.
Another study by Callaghan et al. (2005) with five different cultures also con-
firmed the age of success at the false belief task was similar in all of them when
measured using a single, standardized procedure. Lastly, a study by Shatz et al.
(2003) indicates that there is no difference between children acquiring a language
with different words to refer to true and false beliefs (such as Turkish and Puerto
Rican Spanish) and those that do not make this distinction (such as English for
instance). To sum up, the argument bearing on linguistic determinism has to be
abandoned in light of this data.
2.3.2.2 Are some aspects of language specifically related to theory of mind?

The studies reviewed in the preceding section highlighted the role of language
as a general cognitive faculty for the development of theory of mind abilities.
But some researchers have made some more specific hypotheses regarding the
precise aspects of language that may be related to theory of mind. For example,
Olson (1988) thinks that it is specifically the acquisition of mental state terms
like think and believe that enable children to develop mindreading abilities.
Astington and Jennings (1999) have emphasized the role of syntax for the devel-
opment of theory of mind.
Even more precise hypotheses have been formulated by de Villiers and Pyers
(2002), regarding the kind of syntactic structures that form the basis of this abil-
ity. More specifically, these authors argue that mastery of complement clauses is
the linguistic prerequisite for the development of theory of mind, because it is the
only structure that enables the embedding of a proposition with a different truth
conditional status with respect to the main clause. For example, sentence (1) can
be true while the embedded clause (2) is actually false. Other embedded struc-
tures such as relative clauses do not offer this possibility.
(1) Jean thinks the ball is in the box.
(2) The ball is in the box.
This property also seems to be specific to complements and does not carry over to
adjuncts. Indeed in (3) the adjunct (the ball is in the box) cannot have a different
truth conditional status with respect to the main clause.
(3) John is confused because the ball is in the box.
De Villiers and Pyers moreover justify their hypothesis by the fact that in English,
verbs of desire such as want take an infinitival structure as for example in (4) with-
out a real embedding as it is the case for verbs of communication and cognition.
(4) I want to eat.
The interesting point is that children start to produce verbs of desire before verbs
of belief or communication. According to the authors, this difference is due to
the difference in the underlying syntactic structures. This conclusion has been
confirmed in two training studies showing that training normally developing
children to understand false complements with communication verbs increased
their performance on false belief tasks (Hale and Tager-Flusberg 2003; Lohmann
and Tomasello 2003).
Other studies involving deaf children also point to the same conclusion. For
example, de Villiers and de Villiers (2003) found that oral deaf childrens and
ASL-learning deaf childrens performance on both verbal and non verbal versions
of the false belief task was most closely predicted in regression analyses by their
mastery of complements. In another study, Pyers (2001) tested first generation
Nicaraguan signers who had not been exposed to formal signed language, and
whose language did not contain complex structures on false belief tasks. These
subjects systematically failed even non-verbal versions. On the other hand,
younger signers who had acquired more evolved versions of Nicaraguan sign lan-
guage did pass them.
However, the hypothesis that the syntax of complement clauses alone sets the
pace for the acquisition of false belief reasoning runs into a number of difficulties.
Perner et al. (2003) have for example studied the acquisition of desire and mental
state verbs by German-speaking children. Contrary to English, in German verbs
of desire like want can also be communicated with an embedded complement
clause as in (5), just like verbs of beliefs (6).
(5) Ich will dass Maria zu hause geht.
I want that Maria home goes.
I want Maria to go home.
(6) Ich glaube dass Maria zu hause geht.
I think that Maria home goes.
I think that Maria goes home.
Despite this syntactic similarity, German-speaking children show exactly the

same pattern of development as their English-speaking peers, and also start to
produce and understand verbs of desire before verbs of communication or mental
states. If children really were acquiring their knowledge of mental state verbs by
analogy with communication verbs as de Villiers (2000) predicts, why would they
fail to do so between desire and mental state verbs in German?
To sum up, the specific predictions regarding the role of certain syntactic
structures for the use of mental state terms seem to be too strong for at least two
reasons. First, they imply de facto a form of linguistic determinism. As argued
above, all languages do not offer the same lexical possibilities to express mental
states. Similarly, the syntactic structures used to express a proposition containing
them differ from one language to another. However, no systematic difference has
been found in the development of theory of mind abilities depending on childrens
mother tongue. The second problem is that it is difficult to separate the semantic
and syntactic properties of words related to the communication of beliefs. For
instance, having a full understanding of the verb think both requires a grasp of its
meaning and of the syntactic structures required to use it correctly.
In conclusion, as is the case for the language faculty, it is probably more rea-
sonable to assume that the various domains of language are bootstrapping each
other in the development of theory of mind abilities.
2.3.2.3 What the study of adult aphasics can tell us about the relation
between language and theory of mind
The two types of arguments presented above regarding the role of language for
theory of mind development reflect a fundamental disagreement about the very
nature of the relation between language and theory of mind. On the one hand, re-
searchers like de Villiers and Pyers (2002) think that the concepts of mental states
are intrinsically represented in language. If, as they argue, complex grammatical
structures really are a prerequisite to the formulation of thoughts about mental
states, then the development of theory of mind should be dependent on language
(this view corresponds to what Saxe and Baron-Cohen (2006) call the parasitic
hypothesis). Other researchers (for instance Baldwin and Saylor 2005) propose a
weaker hypothesis. In this alternative view, the ability to speak about mental states
is an important source of data for constructing concepts about mental states. In
this account, verbal communication does therefore facilitate the development of
theory of mind abilities, without playing a crucial constitutive role in the repre-
sentation of beliefs (this view corresponds to what Saxe and Baron-Cohen (2006)
call the communicative hypothesis).
According to Saxe and Baron-Cohen, these two hypotheses make precise pre-
dictions regarding the relation between language and theory of mind in adults.
According to the parasitic hypothesis, syntactic structures provide the represen-
tational substrate necessary to the attribution of mental states. The requirement to
have intact linguistic abilities in order to have a functional theory of mind should
then be found in adults as well as children. The communicative hypothesis makes
different predictions. According to this hypothesis, it is possible that language
facilitates the development of theory of mind abilities in children, but once the
necessary concepts are acquired, a functional theory of mind could be preserved
in the absence of language.
In order to determine which of these hypotheses is correct, it is interesting
to observe what happens when speakers lose their grammatical competence dur-
ing adulthood, when their theory of mind abilities are already functional. Several
studies have investigated theory of mind abilities of adult patients with severe
grammatical impairments. A first study by Varley and Siegal (2000) demonstrated
that once they became functional, theory of mind abilities did not rely on gram-
matical abilities. These authors report the case of a patient with severe agrammatic
aphasia, who was unable to process linguistic propositions in any modality of lan-
guage use. This patients ability to reason about mental states was however intact.
In another case study, Apperly et al. (2006) have reached the same conclusion.
These authors report the case of a young man who has suffered a left-hemisphere
stroke, whom they have tested on a series of linguistic and theory of mind tasks.
This patient had severely reduced abilities on tests of syntax, and especially those
involving embedded structures, but had fully intact theory of mind abilities, even
on advanced (non-verbal) tasks.
These studies tend to indicate that adult subjects retain a functional theory
of mind even in the absence of syntactic abilities. These results therefore pro-
vide strong confirmation for the communicative hypothesis. Even though the
development of theory of mind abilities, especially at the explicit level, are to a
certain extent dependant on language, theory of mind abilities are not intrin-
sically dependant on some specific linguistic faculties, such as the syntax of
complement clauses.
2.3.3 Theory of mind development as a pre-requisite

for language acquisition
Contrary to the studies reviewed in the preceding section, some researchers see
the question of language and theory of mind the other way round and emphasize
the role of theory of mind abilities as a prerequisite for normal language acquisi-
tion. However, it is clearly not the case that full-fledged theory of mind abilities
are necessary for language acquisition to begin, since children start to speak years
before they have adult-like mentalizing abilities. Weaker hypotheses can however
be maintained.
One influence of theory of mind on language acquisition can be found in the
domain of lexical acquisition. Children start producing their first words at around
the age of one year, but it seems likely that most of them already understand some
words by the age of eight or nine months (Bloom 2000). It is also precisely around
that age that the first sub-modules of theory of mind are operational. In Baron-
Cohens model (1995), these modules are the Intentionality Detector and the Eye
Direction Detector (see Chapter 1, Section 1.1.3). The Eye Direction Detector
module being strictly devoted to the visual modality, its influence on lexical ac-
quisition is necessarily limited. Indeed, blind children acquire a lexicon in the
absence of visual input. However, it is probable that the detection of a form of
intentionality is important for lexical acquisition.
A stronger link can later be established between the acquisition of the sub-
module dealing with shared-attention around 18 months and the sudden vocabu-
lary spurt experienced by many children around that age. More specifically, sev-
eral experiments conducted by Baldwin and summarized above (Section 2.2.1.2)
indicate that around the age of 18 months, children are able to use the clue pro-
vided by speakers attention in order to find the meaning of an unknown word.
Several factors other than theory of mind have been called on to explain the
process of lexical acquisition, such as simple association mechanisms or the use
of linguistic clues. However, according to Diesendruck (2004), when children
are faced with two types of potentially contradictory clues, for example a syn-
tactic clue and a clue obtained by reasoning about the speakers mental states,
they tend to systematically favor the clue related to theory of mind. It therefore
seems that lexical acquisition, while requiring a series of different abilities, relies
to a large extend on theory of mind abilities. However, this does not mean that
having a theory of mind is a sine qua non condition for acquiring a lexicon. For
example, a proportion of autistic children learn to speak in the absence of this
ability. Diesendruck suggests distinguishing between the lexicon acquired using
theory of mind abilities and the lexicon learned by simple association techniques.
The idea is that the kind of lexicon that can be learned in the absence of theory of
mind abilities does not enable optimal communication, because it cannot be used
to understand and express various kinds of intentions. Autistic children have in-
deed a tendency to extreme literality that prevents them from understanding the
uses of many words in context (see Chapter 3).
2.3.4 The development of language and theory of mind:

A mutual influence scenario
Based on all the evidence reviewed in this chapter, I suggest the following devel-
opmental progression. During their first year of life, childrens rudimentary and
implicit theory of mind abilities enable them to start acquiring language. For this
reason, autistic children, who lack these implicit abilities, systematically show a
significant language delay (or no language at all). This interaction notably enables
children to produce their first words around the age of one. Around the age of 18
months, when they acquire a shared-attention mechanism, children have at their
disposal a powerful tool to increase their lexicon, which then starts to develop at
a much faster pace.
In the course of childrens following years, all the work presented in this chap-
ter tends to confirm the importance of language for the development of more
. It is interesting to note that de Villiers (2007) proposes a similar pattern of directional influ-
ence, even though her arguments stem from a quite different theoretical perspective.
complex and explicit theory of mind abilities. Indeed, the acquisition of language
gives children a tool to talk about mental states and to reason consciously about
other peoples mental states. At a general level, it is possible to say that the more
complex the mentalizing abilities, the more obvious their relation to language
becomes. A strong influence of language is for instance apparent in the results
obtained from the false belief test, and this relation is even stronger in the case of
advanced tests, which require complex metalinguistic abilities.
Language therefore seems to play a crucial role for the development of the
more complex and explicit aspects of theory of mind abilities. However, hypoth-
eses regarding the kind of linguistic concepts or structures that could be more
specifically responsible for this influence do not seem to be entirely justified. It
seems more reasonable to state that the language faculty as a whole facilitates the
development of explicit theory of mind abilities. This influence is further con-
firmed by studies that underline the role of some environmental factors in this
development, such as the presence of an elder sibling or the quality of the interac-
tions with the mother. It seems also quite plausible that the ability to talk about
mental states should facilitate the comprehension of these concepts.
In conclusion, acquiring a functional theory of mind rests at least in part
on childrens linguistic abilities. From Chapter 4 onwards, I will concentrate on
the reverse influence and show that childrens developing theory of mind abilities
are crucial for the acquisition of a number of complex linguistic abilities, beyond
early lexical acquisition. More specifically, I will argue that the development of
theory of mind abilities is a prerequisite for the appropriate use of some lexical
items, that specifically require the ability to reason about mental states. This is al-
ready known of epistemic modals and mental state verbs and, as I will show, some
uses of discourse connectives.
2.4 Summary
In this chapter, I have reviewed several arguments showing that language and
theory of mind abilities are intimately related. Many studies confirm the role of
language for the acquisition of theory of mind abilities while others indicate that
theory of mind abilities are necessary to acquire some aspects of language, espe-
cially at the lexical and pragmatic levels. In consequence, the idea that one ability
might determine the developmental course of the other must be abandoned. It
is indeed quite implausible that language could be a prerequisite for the devel-
opment of all forms of theory of mind, especially at the implicit level. As some
recent studies have indicated, children already have a quite sophisticated implicit
understanding of beliefs shortly after their first birthday, when they are only able
to produce a limited number of isolated words. It is just as improbable that a

functional theory of mind is necessary in order to acquire a language, given that a
number of autistic children speak in the absence of this ability.
In summary, the link between the acquisition of language and theory of mind
is complex and bidirectional, as Slade and Ruffman (2005) have found: childrens
early linguistic abilities are a good predictor of their later theory of mind abili-
ties, but the reverse is also true, in other words, childrens early mentalizing abili-
ties are also a good predictor of their subsequent linguistic abilities. According
to the scenario proposed in this chapter, the mutual influence between language
and theory of mind is not equal at all stages of development. In the first phase,
childrens rudimentary theory of mind abilities are crucial for early language ac-
quisition and later on, the acquisition of complex mentalizing concepts and syn-
tactic structures provide them with important tools for developing more complex
mindreading abilities.
chapter 3
Insights from autism on language

and theory of mind
This chapter sheds some additional light on the relationship between verbal com-
munication and theory of mind, thus completing the discussion of the preceding
chapters. It is mostly dedicated to the presentation of autism, a developmental
pathology involving a profound deficit in theory of mind abilities that has been
documented in detail over the past twenty years.
I will start by giving a definition of the autistic spectrum of disorders (3.1).
On the basis of cognitive and behavioral arguments, I will defend the view that
Asperger syndrome and semantic-pragmatic disorder should be included in the
spectrum. I will go on to describe the language and communication impairments
most commonly found in autism (3.2) and show how the hypothesis of a deficient
theory of mind can account for many of these impairments (3.3). I will however
also point out that this hypothesis is not totally sufficient to explain the whole ar-
ray of communicative impairments described in the literature and show how an
alternative cognitive theory of autism called weak central coherence can precisely
account for them (3.4). Lastly, I will review other pathologies that have also been
said to involve a theory of mind deficit (3.5), namely schizophrenia and right-
hemisphere damage. In conclusion, I will argue that despite some superficial
similarities between these conditions, autism remains the only deficit that sys-
tematically implies a profound and generalized deficit in theory of mind abilities
and thus is the best-suited pathology to study in order to uncover the relationship
between pragmatics and theory of mind.
3.1 Autism: A definition
Autism is a developmental disorder affecting boys four times as often as girls,

with symptoms becoming noticeable before the age of three. According to the
American Psychiatric Association (2000), the three defining characteristics of au-
tism are: (1) impaired social interaction, (2) delays/deficits in language and com-
munication, (3) restrained, repetitive and stereotypical behaviours, activities and
interests.
Since the first descriptions of this pathology produced independently by Leo

Kanner in Baltimore in 1943 and one year later by Hans Asperger in Vienna,
numerous theories have been put forward to explain the enigma of autism. For
many decades, psychodynamic theories that emphasized the role of childrens
interactions with their families and more precisely the problem of refrigerated
mothers (Bettelheim 1969) prevailed. With the development of cognitive sci-
ences, they have now progressively been replaced by neuro-cognitive models
explaining autism by a deficit in theory of mind, a weak central coherence or a
problem of executive control. Far from being mutually exclusive, every one of
these cognitive models can partially explain the complex array of symptoms that
characterize this pathology.
In this section, I will present arguments in favor of a biological basis of autism
and discuss the possible delimitation of the autistic spectrum. In the remainder
of this chapter, I will present the communication difficulties of autistic individu-
als and discuss two cognitive theories that were proposed to account for them:
the hypothesis of a theory of mind deficit and the hypothesis of a weak central
coherence. I will not discuss in detail the theory of executive dysfunction, because
it is mainly useful to explain problems related to repetitive and stereotypical be-
haviors and interests. Even though there is a now well-documented link between
executive function and theory of mind (Perner and Lang 1999), the former theory
is not specifically designed to address communication problems.
3.1.1 The biological basis of autism
The biological basis of autism is now widely recognized, thanks to a growing

number of studies in the domains of genetics and cognitive neurosciences (see for
instance Frith and Hill 2004; Saxe and Baron-Cohen 2006 for a review). One of
the main discoveries in this domain is the strong heritability of autism. As is the
case for theory of mind development (see Chapter 2), the most interesting studies
in this respect have been conducted on populations of monozygotic and dizygotic
twins. For monozygotic twins, results show that if one twin suffers from autism,
the probability that the other is also autistic is between 36% and 90%, depend-
ing on the defining criteria of autism (Bailey et al. 1995). On the other hand, no
such correlation has been found for dizygotic twins. Another strong indicator of
the genetic component of autism is the strong prevalence of this disease in boys.
The average proportion is 4: 1 but it can even reach 15 : 1 in the case of Asperger
syndrome (U. Frith 2003).
. For a presentation of Asperger syndrome, see Section 3.1.2.1.

Chapter 3. Insights from autism on language and theory of mind 55
Some studies have revealed the existence of anomalous structures in the brain
of autistic subjects. For example, most people with normal language function
have a leftward asymmetry of the brain (the left side bigger than the right side)
in regions important for language processing such as Brocas area. Conversely,
Herbert et al. (2005) found a different pattern for autistic children, who showed a
tendency towards rightward asymmetry in cortical regions. It is probable that the
two sides of the brain have different aptitudes for language processing.
Recent studies using brain imaging techniques have also revealed several
anomalies in the blood flow in some regions of the brains of autistic individuals.
For example, Meresse et al. (2005) have found that low blood flow was related to
the severity of autistic behaviors. Other brain studies have revealed that the brain
of autistic subjects is on average bigger and heavier than normal (Courchesne et
al. 2001). This anomaly is not present from birth but becomes visible between the
ages of two and four. According to Chris Frith (2003), the increase in the size of
the brain could be due to a lack of pruning of synaptic connections in this popula-
tion. This problem could explain both the increasing head size in early childhood
and the dysfunction of some neuronal circuits, which could in turn cause the
kinds of deficits observed in autistic subjects.
Lastly, several studies (for example Chandana et al. 2005) have shown that
blood serotonin levels were elevated in autistic children. It is argued that his prob-
lem might be related to the hemispheric dysfunction described above and hence,
cause language impairments.
Even though the biological basis of autism is now widely accepted, diagnostic
criteria for this disease remain purely behavioral, because no specific biological
indicator of autism has been identified as yet.
3.1.2 The autistic spectrum
The diagnosis of autism is particularly difficult to establish, because the clinical

picture of this pathology can be more or less severe depending on the cases in
question, which range from deep to high-functioning. Its manifestations are also
variable depending on several factors such as education and the personality of
the subject. Moreover, autism has a frequent co-morbidity with other patholo-
gies such as anxiety and depression, and is often accompanied by a more or less
severe form of mental retardation. Because of this high heterogeneity, autism is
usually considered to be a spectrum of disorders. Another problem for diagnosis
is that some subjects only display a subset of the typical characteristics of au-
tism, and this heterogeneity implies that the extremities of the autistic spectrum
should be specified.
3.1.2.1 Asperger syndrome

At the higher end of the autistic spectrum, subjects suffering from Asperger syn-
drome have traditionally been distinguished from the rest of the autistic popu-
lation. This name is a reference to Hans Asperger who has first described it in
the 1940s. The main characteristic of Asperger syndrome is that, contrary to the
autistic subjects described by Kanner, they do not suffer from any kind of cogni-
tive or language delay. However, it doesnt mean that the language of children
suffering from Asperger syndrome is completely normal. In fact, parents often
describe the vocabulary of their Asperger children as precociously adult-like, no-
tably because it contains a lot of words rarely used by children. In spite of these
differences, subjects suffering from Asperger syndrome share with autistic sub-
jects social and communication problems, as well as limited and stereotypical
activities and interests.
The question is whether Asperger syndrome is a distinct pathology with re-
spect to autism, from a genetic, neurophysiological and cognitive point of view, or
whether it is simply a light form of autism. This question is all the more justified
because at the higher end of the spectrum, there is already a pre-defined category
called high-functioning autistics, differing from Asperger syndrome because of
their language delay during childhood.
The majority of studies now tend to show that Asperger syndrome is a form
of autism. Three types of arguments are used to justify this grouping (Frith 2004).
First, from a genetic point of view, the two disorders very often occur together:
cases of autism and Asperger syndrome are often found in the same families. It is
therefore plausible that the same genetic predispositions give rise to these two pa-
thologies. Second, in adulthood, it is very difficult to distinguish individuals who
had previously been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome or with high-function-
ing autism (Howlin 2003). In fact, high-functioning autistics often compensate
for the language delay they had in childhood and that served to separate them
from subjects with Asperger syndrome. Third, the kind of brain anomalies ob-
served is very similar in both cases.
3.1.2.2 Semantic-pragmatic disorder

Subjects suffering from semantic-pragmatic disorder (also called pragmatic lan-
guage impairment) share with the autistic profile severe communication problems
. Kanner and Asperger themselves were actually convinced that they were describing totally
different types of patients. Aspergers work has long been ignored because it was available only
in German until Uta Frith (1991) translated it into English.
. A language delay is diagnosed when children do not produce isolated words at the age of
two and communicative utterances at the age of three.
but have rather unimpaired social skills. Contrary to Asperger syndrome, which
is now almost always treated as a form of autism, the status of semantic-pragmatic
disorder remains a matter of controversy. From a diagnostic perspective, it should
be noted that neither the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association 2000) or the
ICD 10 (World Health Organization 1992) recognize the existence of semantic-
pragmatic disorder.
This pathology, described for the first time by Rapin and Allen (1983), in-
volves problems in language comprehension, echolalia, as well as the inability
to use language and gestures for communicative purposes, even though subjects
have a rather fluent verbal production. Some subjects also have severe behavioral
problems as well as a very limited symbolic play.
Despite its obvious resemblance to autism, numerous researchers still believe
that at least some of these children cannot be considered as autistic10. However, as
Happ (1996) observes, this judgment only relies on the fact that these children
are not withdrawn and show affection. However, the application of these latter
criteria correspond to a very narrow definition of autism, limited to Kanners de-
scription. Children suffering from semantic-pragmatic disorder are also described
as egocentric, incapable of interacting with their peers and showing affection only
to adults. This last characteristic is strongly reminiscent of Asperger syndrome.
The similarity between Asperger syndrome and semantic-pragmatic disor-
der provides a first argument that this pathology is part of the autistic spectrum.
However, a more general argument can also be called upon to justify this classi-
fication. In order for the semantic-pragmatic disorder to be treated as a separate
diagnostic entity with respect to autism, it should be possible to find subjects with
a deficit in verbal communication (pragmatics) but who do not suffer from any
kind of socialization problem. Such subjects do not actually seem to exist. In fact,
none of the children suffering from semantic-pragmatic disorder have normal so-
cial interactions11. From a cognitive point of view, it is moreover likely that com-
municative and socialization skills are strongly related. I will discuss this point in
more detail in the following section, in relation to the social and communicative
impairments found in autism.
10. For a review, see Boucher (1998) and the clinical forum following it.
11. In fact, even children suffering from specific language impairment (SLI) seem to have prob-
lems with social interactions and have sometimes been found to fail the false belief test (Miller
2001; Gillott et al. 2004). However, they do not have a real theory of mind impairment. It seems
more probable that their linguistic difficulties simply prevent them from engaging in complex
social interactions. Moreover, the linguistic constraints of the false belief task are probably re-
sponsible for their failure.
3.2 Language and communication impairments in autism
The language deficits of autistic subjects are mostly related to the appropriate use
of language for communication, in other words pragmatics. In fact, at least some
autistic subjects do not have any deficit in the formal domains of language such
as syntax or phonology. However, as mentioned above, autism is a spectrum and
language abilities display important variations between the subjects. At the lower
end of the spectrum, about 50 to 75% of autistic subjects do not develop any form
of language (Rapin 1991). Among the verbal autistic children, there is an ongo-
ing debate to determine if their language deficit is specific to their condition or if
they suffer from specific language impairment (SLI) in addition to autism. I will
come back to this controversy in Section 3.2.1 below. In any case, difficulties in
the formal aspects of language are more variable and always less severe than in the
domain of pragmatics. Frith (2003:118) observes that: whatever the level of syn-
tactic or semantic skill in autism, the level of pragmatic skill will be lower. In this
section, I will review the deficits observed for the various domains of language,
with particular emphasis on pragmatic abilities.
3.2.1 Handling the formal aspects of language
In the course of normal language acquisition, the first year of life is mostly dedi-
cated to the development of comprehension and production of sounds (see Chap-
ter 2). In the case of autistic children, it is difficult to assess if the onset of babbling
is normal or not, because the diagnostic of autism cannot reliably be given at that
age. As far as later phonological development is concerned, only few studies have
addressed this question, and as Tager-Flusberg (2001) observes, their results are
often contradictory. However, a recent electrophysiological study by Rapin (2003)
tends to indicate that verbal autistic children have auditory input abnormalities
similar to that found for children with specific language impairment. One thing
remains certain however: those of the autistic children who have a functional
language faculty reach a mature phonological syntax comparable to that of nor-
mal children during early childhood. On the other hand, autistic children seem
to be systematically impaired at the prosodic level. Even children suffering from
Asperger syndrome, who do not have a language delay, have important prosodic
difficulties and their speech often sounds pedantic for this reason.
As far as the lexicon is concerned, autistic children also have important dif-
ficulties. More specifically, they have a tendency to use words in an idiosyncratic
and excessively limited fashion. For instance, an autistic child using the word cup
to refer to his own cup can often not generalize this label to name other cups.
Another peculiarity of lexical acquisition in autism is that these children have

a tendency to name objects based on personal associative criteria. For example,
Frith (2003) relates the example of an idiosyncratic use of word found in Kanners
work. It concerns a two-year-old child called Paul, who repeated a sentence from
a nursery rhyme Peter, peter pumpkin eater every time he saw an object re-
sembling a saucepan. This strange behavior appeared one day after his mother
dropped a saucepan in the kitchen while she was singing this rhyme. As I have
discussed in Chapter 2, normally developing children as young as 18 months are
able to use very sophisticated clues related to the development of their mental-
izing abilities to assign the correct label to un unknown word. However, autistic
children seem to be unable to use these clues (Baron-Cohen et al. 1997), and
therefore make a number of inappropriate mappings.
Autistic children have a strong tendency to invent words or to assign new
meanings to existing words. For example, a child has coined the work snook to
talk about the chocolate chunks found in some ice-creams (Attwood 2003). De-
spite an undeniable creativity in the naming of things, one of the main linguistic
characteristics of autistic children is the endless repetition of the words and sen-
tences they hear. The tendency, called echolalia, is present in almost 75% of verbal
autistics (Frith 2003:122).
A study by Howlin (2003) on the lexicon of autistic children shows that sub-
jects suffering from Asperger syndrome, even though no language delay is iden-
tified during childhood, have nevertheless a lexicon significantly smaller than
normal once they reach adulthood. This deficit is found both in comprehension
and production: the average delay in comprehension is 12 years and 10 years in
production. More interestingly still, this delay was similar for subjects who had
been diagnosed with high-functioning autism and those diagnosed with Asperger
syndrome during their childhood. This is a remarkable result, since the diagnosis
criterion for Asperger syndrome is precisely the absence of language delay during
childhood. Howlins study therefore tends to indicate that the differences between
high-functioning autism and Asperger syndrome are irrelevant for adults.
A well documented lexical problem of autistic children is the systematic re-
versal of the personal pronouns I and you. For instance, an autistic child will ask
for an object by saying You want the teddy bear instead of I want the teddy
bear. This problem can be interpreted at least partially as a form of echolalia and
is also clearly related to autistic childrens difficulties with perspective taking.
In the domain of syntax, a longitudinal study conducted by Tager-Flusberg et
al. (1990) with children suffering from autism, Downs syndrome and normally
developing children has found no difference in the stages of acquisition of syn-
tactic structures for autistic children compared to the other two groups. Rather
unsurprisingly, even though the order of acquisition between the structures was
similar, the autistic and Downs syndrome groups acquired them significantly
later than normally developing children.
However, other studies have found some abnormalities in autistic childrens
syntax. For example, Eigsti et al. (2006) note an unusual use of questions. Roberts
et al. (2004) also note that eight and nine year-old autistic children dont master
the plural agreement with -s and find a high rate of tense omission in children
until they are 15 years-old. In an earlier study (Tager-Flusberg 1991) had also
observed some abnormalities in autistic childrens use of the past tense with -ed.
These syntactic problems further tend to confirm the relation between the autistic
population and children suffering from specific language impairment, since very
similar linguistic problems are observed in this population (Leonard 1997).
Despite these similarities, the comparison between autism and specific lan-
guage impairment has not yet provided conclusive evidence that they should be
treated as one and the same thing. First of all, data on syntax in autism remains
very scarce and as Phillips (2005) observes, problems with verb inflections have
been found in many other developmental language disorders presumed to have
different genetic causes than those for autism. Moreover, genetic comparisons be-
tween autism and specific language impairments has led to controversial results
(Whitehouse et al. 2008).
Lastly, an interesting finding regarding language acquisition in autism is that
the acquisition process is probably not simply delayed but also different compared
to normally developing children. As discussed in Chapter 2, when language is
acquired by normally developing children, comprehension usually precedes pro-
duction. Charman (2004) argues that in the autistic population, the reverse pat-
tern is observed with production often preceding comprehension. Moreover, it
seems that all linguistic improvements of autistic children are achieved during the
preschool or middle-school period. Sigman and McGovern (2005) have tested the
language skills of autistic adolescents who had previously been assessed during
childhood and found that all cognitive and language skills had remained stable
or declined since middle-school. As Sigman and McGovern (2005:22) observe,
there seems to be a sensitive period for children with autism to gain elementary
cognitive and language skills. In light of their results, it seems that this period
probably ends after the preschool years.
3.2.2 Pragmatic abilities
In the domain of pragmatics, autistic childrens deficit is generalized. I have re-

viewed in the preceding chapter the vast array of abilities, cognitive and social,
usually grouped under the term pragmatic abilities. I will discuss them in turn
below in relation to autism, with the conclusion that autistic subjects suffer from
important impairments, even at the higher end of the autistic spectrum.
3.2.2.1 The social side of pragmatics

Already during the preverbal period, parents of autistic children notice that their
children do not produce proto-declarative pointing to call their attention to
something. This seems to indicate that contrary to normally developing children,
autistic children do not use language to share their interest for an object. On the
other hand, they use proto-imperative pointing in order to ask for something,
just like the other children. This general observation finds some confirmation in a
study conducted by Wetherby and Prutting (1984) on the use of speech acts by au-
tistic and normally developing children. Their results show that autistic children
use requests in order to ask for an object or an action just like the other children.
However other types of requests such as requests for information were completely
absent from their production.
The term pragmatic abilities also covers conversational skills. At a basic
level such as turn taking, autistic children seem to have globally intact abilities
(Tager-Flusberg 2001). However, they are often incapable of maintaining a topic
of conversation across several turns or to change topic in an appropriate way.
For instance, they often use fixed expressions like by the way, talking of or
well, anyway without introducing a new topic of conversation (Frith 2003:128).
Volden (2004) also found that autistic subjects were more likely than controls to
produce bizarre topic shifts or to discontinue the interaction.
At the social level, pragmatic abilities are strongly related to the mastery of
politeness rules. At this level too, autistic subjects have numerous difficulties, no-
tably because they mix the various levels of politeness in an inappropriate man-
ner. For example, Baltaxe (1977) studied German-speaking autistic teenagers
and found that they were mixing the polite and familiar forms (Sie and du) inap-
propriately. Moreover, they sometimes use an excessively polite language. Frith
(2003:133) relates the case of a young autistic boy who often started his phone
calls to his favorite aunt by Its M. C. Smith, your nephew, calling.
In sum, it seems that autistic subjects suffer from deficits in the domains of
pragmatic abilities related to social norms, which corroborates the fact that one of
the main diagnostic criteria for autism is impaired social interactions.
3.2.2.2 The cognitive side of pragmatics

From a cognitive point of view, having pragmatic abilities means to be able, as
a hearer, to enrich a linguistically incomplete message in an appropriate way in
order to understand the speakers meaning. This task, which is performed in an
automatic and unconscious way by normal speakers, seems to be problematic

for autistic subjects.
The inability to attribute a propositional attitude to another person implies
the impossibility of understanding most forms of non literal language use, such as
hyperboles, metaphors, irony and more generally, all approximate uses of words.
This tendency to interpret words in an over literal manner is well described by
Liane Willey, who suffers from Asperger syndrome (1999:18):
Words had yet to develop into metaphors or similes or analogies or main ideas.
It was all about details and pedantic rules and one-way semantics. I never con-
sidered a statement had more than one meaning. I always assumed the meaning
I inferred was the intent of the speaker.
Autistic people also have great difficulty understanding indirect speech acts.
Attwood (2003:57) reports the case of a father who asked his Asperger son to
make him a cup of tea. Later on, when the tea didnt come, he asked his son what
had happened to his tea. His son answered that it was in the teapot. He had simply
failed to understand that the request to make tea also implied to bring it to the
person who had requested it when ready. This over-literal interpretation of words
and utterances is commonplace in autism.
To conclude, formal aspects of language such as phonology and syntax can be
more or less spared depending on the subjects. Therefore, impairments in these
domains are not part of the core language impairments found in autism. Accord-
ing to Happ (1996:3637), the language and communication deficits specific to
autism include the following elements:
delay or lack of development of speech, without any compensating gesture;
failure to respond to others speech (e.g. the child doesnt orient
to his own name);
stereotyped and repetitive use of language;
pronoun reversal (saying you for I);
idiosyncratic use of words, and appearance of neologisms;
failure to initiate or sustain conversation normally;
abnormalities of prosody (pitch, stress, intonation);
semantic/conceptual difficulties;
abnormal non-verbal communication (gesture, facial expression).
3.3 The mindblindness hypothesis
I have argued in the preceding chapter that the concept of theory of mind encom-
passes a vast array of abilities, developing gradually over many years. In this sec-
tion, I will discuss how and to what extent autistic childrens theory of mind could
be impaired or, as Baron-Cohen puts it, if autistic children are indeed mindblind. I
will go on to show that many of the communicative impairments presented above
can be explained by the hypothesis of a deficient theory of mind.
3.3.1 The nature of theory of mind impairment in autism
I have defended in Chapter 1 a view of theory of mind as an autonomous cog-

nitive mental module. According to Baron-Cohens model (1995), this module
can be subdivided into four sub-modules. In normally developing children, these
sub-modules gradually develop between the ages of nine months and four years
(see Chapter 1, Section 1.1.3). As far as autistic children are concerned, the ques-
tion is which of these sub-modules could be impaired, leading to deficient theory
of mind abilities.
According to Baron-Cohen, the most rudimentary module, the Intentionality
Detector, is not deficient in autistic children. First, they spontaneously produce
utterances conveying desire or intention, for example She wants the ice-cream
or She is going to go swimming (Tager-Flusberg 1989; Baron-Cohen et al. 1985).
Second, they can distinguish animate and inanimate objects, which corresponds
to one of the main tasks of this module. Third, they understand that desires cre-
ate emotions, and that a person will be happier if she gets what she wants than if
she does not. The second module of theory of mind, which develops during the
babys first nine months, is the Eye-Direction Detector. Baron-Cohen also argues
that this module is intact in autism, notably because autistic children are able to
identify if someone is looking in their direction or not.
Autistic childrens impairment starts, according to Baron-Cohen, with the
Shared-Attention Mechanism. Autistic children are indeed unable to handle the
kinds of triadic representation it requires (such as mummy sees I see the ap-
ple). Moreover, they seem to be impaired in all tasks involving shared attention.
It follows logically that this module cannot provide adequate information to the
theory of mind module, which in turn cannot be functional.
To summarize, autistic children do not possess fully functional theory of
mind abilities. It is however probable that the most rudimentary aspects of this
faculty are present in this population. This conclusion finds some confirmation in
a study by Carpenter et al. (2001) showing that, even though autistic subjects are
unable to attribute false beliefs, they can understand simpler mental states such
as intentions.
It should however be stressed that not all autistic children fail false belief tests.
According to Frith and Happ (1994), about 20% of autistic children are able to
pass them. This does not mean however that the mindblindness hypothesis has
to be abandoned. Happ (1996) discusses two possible explanations to account
for this phenomenon. First, it is possible that these subjects develop compensa-
tory strategies to pass the test without having a real understanding of beliefs in
general. It is moreover quite plausible that language plays an important role in
the development of these compensatory strategies, since verbal age is the stron-
gest predictor of success at the task (Happ 1995). Second, it is also possible that
autism does not always cause permanent damage in theory of mind abilities but
sometimes only a significant delay in its development. This second hypothesis is
corroborated by the fact that autistic children who pass the false belief test always
have a mental age of seven years or more. However, most (but not all) subjects
keep on failing at advanced (second-order) versions of the task.
Lastly, a study by Baron-Cohen (1997) indicates that autistic children do not
have difficulty in forming all kinds of metarepresentations but are specifically
impaired with the metarepresentation of mental states. In Baron-Cohens study,
this point has been illustrated by autistic childrens different abilities in answer-
ing questions embedding either speech acts or mental states. These children were
perfectly able to understand questions involving the metarepresentation of an
utterance like Does he say that X? but they failed as soon as mental states were
involved, as for instance in the question Does he think that X? This result also
tends to confirm that theory of mind abilities are only a subset of humans meta-
representational abilities.
3.3.2 Language and communication deficits related to theory of mind
As argued in Chapter 1, for all inferential models of communication, the role of

theory of mind in verbal communication is fundamental. Therefore, the deficit in
theory of mind has often been put forward to explain the numerous communica-
tion problems of the autistic population.
Indeed, autistic childrens delay in language acquisition can be attributed to a
deficit in theory of mind, especially in the lexical domain. In the preceding chapter,
I have argued that the acquisition of shared-attention explained to a large extent
the sudden vocabulary spurt experienced by many children. Given that autistic
children are unable to use such clues (Baron-Cohen et al. 1997), it is expected that
their lexical acquisition should be disturbed. Crucially, the importance of joint
attention seems to go beyond the level of lexical acquisition. Bono et al. (2004)
found that the level and consistency of joint attention skills was correlated with
the level of early receptive and expressive language abilities and to later language
skills. Mc Duffie et al. (2005) found that the only predictor of later language com-
prehension in preverbal autistic children was the initiation of joint attention.
Problems with joint attention also account for the frequent idiosyncratic uses
of words by autistic children. Contrary to normally developing children, who are
able to use speakers attention as a clue to assign a meaning to an unknown word
by the age of 18 months, autistic children form erroneous associations because
they are not sensitive to such clues. However, Preissler and Carey (2005) found
that autistic children were able to use their prior knowledge to attribute mean-
ing to an unknown word. In their experiment, children were presented with two
pictures of objects, one familiar and the other unfamiliar. They were then asked
to show the experimenter a blicket (or another non-word). Autistic children got
82% accuracy in the test trials. These contrasting results indicate once again that
the problem stems specifically form autistic childrens inability to use social clues
rather than a more general cognitive deficit related to memory or attention.
Autistic childrens prosodic deficit has also been attributed to their lack of the-
ory of mind abilities. Baron-Cohen (1995) thinks that autistic childrens tendency
to speak excessively low or loud and with little prosodic contour reflects a problem
of shared attention at the auditory level. In fact, the volume chosen by a speaker is
in general adapted to a specific audience. The fact that autistic children are unable
to adapt the volume of their voice shows that they do not identify the person they
are speaking to as a potentially interested listener.
As far as pragmatic abilities are concerned, many difficulties encountered by
autistic subjects can also be accounted for by the theory of mind hypothesis. From
a social point of view, these abilities are related to politeness and conversational
skills. Both these domains actually require the ability to adapt to what ones ad-
dressee knows or believes, in other words it requires the ability to attribute mental
states to them.
Two studies have tried to exploit this relation in order to improve autistic
subjects abilities. In one of them, autistic children have been explicitly taught
techniques to pass the false belief test in order to improve their conversational
skills (Hadwin et al. 1997). In the other, they have been taught a certain number
of conversational skills such as ways to initiate a conversation or to change a topic
appropriately in order to improve their theory of mind skills (Chin and Bernard-
Opitz 2000). In both cases, the improvement of abilities in one domain result-
ing from this extensive training has led to no improvement in the other. These
negative results do not however imply that there is no link between these abilities.
They rather indicate that the surface improvement obtained through intensive
training does not reflect a deep cognitive change but only the development of
compensatory strategies. This finding also provides confirmation of the fact that
autistic children who succeed at the false belief task are likely to use ad hoc com-
pensatory strategies rather than genuine mentalizing abilities.
From a cognitive point of view, the relation between verbal communication
and theory of mind has principally been illustrated at the level of non-literal lan-
guage uses. For instance, Happ (1993) has studied the ability of autistic children
to understand metaphors and irony, and its relation with their theory of mind
abilities. She found that only autistic children who pass first-order theory of mind
tests can understand metaphors and only those who pass second-order tests un-
derstand irony. However, there have been some criticisms (reviewed in Chapter 2,
Section 2.3.1) concerning the relation between metaphors and first-order theory
of mind abilities. On the other hand, the relationship between irony and second
order theory of mind abilities has proved to be very robust and is exploited for
normally developing children in the experiment presented in Chapter 7.
3.4 The weak central coherence hypothesis
Even though the hypothesis of a deficit in theory of mind abilities has proved to
be very useful to explain a large number of difficulties experienced by autistic
subjects, it is not sufficient to explain all the deficits related to this pathology, es-
pecially those that are not related to socialization. In order to explain these other
deficits, Frith (1989/2003) and later on Happ (1999) have elaborated a second
cognitive model, called weak-central coherence. I will briefly present this model
(3.4.1) before showing that it is extremely useful to account for some communica-
tion problems of the autistic population (3.4.2), in particular those not explained
by the theory of mind model.
3.4.1 A cognitive style biased towards the treatment of details
The main tenet of the weak central coherence theory is that autism is charac-
terized by a specific imbalance in the integration of information across various
levels. In normal individuals, one of the main characteristics of information pro-
cessing is a tendency to put together various kinds of information in order to
construct a global meaning in a given context, a tendency that Frith calls central
coherence. For example, people tend to remember the gist of a joke but not the
exact words used to tell it. This human tendency to deal with information at
a global rather than a local level can also be observed in peoples difficulty in
lacing an isolated detail of a jigsaw puzzle in the global image. In sum, people
p
find it easier to remember information when it is organized than when it is pre-
sented in a random manner. According to Frith, this universal human tendency
is also found in people suffering from various mental handicaps but is missing
in autistic people.
As Happ (1999) observes, weak central coherence in autism is best thought
of as a cognitive style rather than a cognitive deficit. In fact, one of the main
advantages of this theory is that it can explain both the deficits and the specific
talents of autism. For example, autistic subjects have a significantly better than
average memory when they have to remember a random list of items. Similarly,
they get excellent results at tests involving jigsaw puzzles, even when the image
is presented upside down. More importantly for the study of verbal communica-
tion, this model can also account for some of the communication problems en-
countered by autistic subjects.
3.4.2 Communicative impairments due to weak central coherence
From the perspective of relevance theory, it is largely predictable that the inability
to integrate information from various sources can cause severe communication
problems. Even though relevance theory has mostly been used to explain the link
between verbal communication and theory of mind, it is also a useful framework
to explain the relations between weak central coherence and some communica-
tion problems in autism. Relevance theory gives a broad definition to the notion
of context, which includes information from the different memories (short and
long term) and is not limited to the immediate context of enunciation. The em-
phasis placed on the use of context thus defined can explain why the inability to
access and integrate contextual information from different sources can lead to
severe communication problems.
Various experimental studies with autistic subjects show that some of their
communication impairments are directly attributable to a problem of weak cen-
tral coherence. For example, a series of experiments conducted by Jolliffe and
Baron-Cohen (1999) sheds light on this relationship. In a first experiment, the
authors showed the link between weak central coherence and the ability to dis-
ambiguate homographs but not homophones like tear or draw in context. When
normal subjects have to read a sentence containing a homograph they automati-
cally adapt their pronunciation depending on the most likely meaning in context.
On the other hand, autistic subjects systematically choose the most frequent pro-
nunciation of the word, even when the context makes it clear that the other one
is appropriate.
In a second experiment, Jolliffe and Baron-Cohen gave autistic subjects a

scenario that required the hearer to make an inference in order for the story to
become coherent. For example, the first sentence was George left his bath water
running and the second sentence was George cleared up the mess in the bathroom.
In order to understand the transition from the first to the second sentence, it is
necessary to make the following inference: the bath had overflowed. Autistic sub-
jects were unable to make this inference.
In a third experiment, autistic subjects had to use context in order to interpret
the meaning of utterances that were ambiguous, either because of a lexical or a
syntactic ambiguity. For instance, they heard a sentence like He drew a gun, where
the verb draw could either mean to pull out or to make a picture of. Once again,
autistic subjects systematically chose the most frequent meaning, even when the
context made it clear that it was inadequate, as in the sentence John went to an art
class. He drew a gun. All the control subjects naturally chose the most plausible
meaning in context.
All these experiments clearly demonstrate the necessity of using context
in order to communicate efficiently. The results obtained by Joliffe and Baron-
Cohen are made even more interesting by the fact that all their subjects passed
advanced false belief tests. Their theory of mind could therefore be considered
as relatively intact.
The dissociation between the ability to pass false belief tests and the problem
of weak central coherence has also been confirmed by Happ (1994). In this ex-
periment, she tested the ability of autistic subjects who had various levels of min-
dreading abilities to understand non-literal utterances such as lies, jokes, etc. Her
results indicate that even subjects who succeed at advanced theory of mind tasks
were not able to provide explanations that were adequate in context.
To conclude, explanations in terms of weak central coherence and theory of
mind are complementary rather than mutually exclusive and taken together, they
provide precise explanations of a large range of the communication problems as-
sociated with autism. Moreover, from the point of view of pragmatics, they are
perfectly compatible with the main tenets of relevance theory: the importance
of mental state attribution as well as the integration of contextual information to
account for successful verbal communication.
3.5 Other pathologies associated with a deficit in theory of mind
The great popularity of the mindblindness hypothesis in autism has led research-
ers to study the possibility that a similar deficit could also be found in other popu-
lations suffering from problems in verbal communication due to schizophrenia or
right hemisphere damage. I will briefly present these two impairments in turn, in
order to compare their deficits with that of autistic subjects. I will conclude that
even though these subjects also fail at mindreading tasks, their cognitive deficit is
not specifically due to a dysfunctional theory of mind as is the case in autism.
3.5.1 Schizophrenia
Frith and Corcoran (1996) have tested the idea that people suffering from schizo-
phrenia might be unable to attribute mental states to others. Contrary to autism,
schizophrenia is not characterized by a stable state and the intensity and the na-
ture of the observed impairments varies from one individual to another. For this
reason, Frith and Corcoran divided their subjects into sub-groups, in order to
separate those with negative symptoms (absence of communication, withdrawal,
lack of motivation), those with positive symptoms (incoherent discourse, disor-
ganized attitude), those with paranoid deliriums and those in remission. Results
obtained at the false belief task tend to confirm the presence of a deficit in theory
of mind abilities for these patients. However, they also display great variability
depending on the sub-group they belong to. The group of patients with negative
symptoms had generalized difficulties, while the group of patients with positive
symptoms as well as the group of patients in remission got results comparable to
the control group.
At first sight, it seems that at least patients with negative symptoms might
have a theory of mind deficit. However, a closer look at the data indicates that this
is likely not to be the case. In fact, the problems experienced by this sub-group
were not limited to the test questions targeting false beliefs but were also apparent
in their failure to answer all control questions. It seems therefore more likely that
their deficit is more generalized than in autism. This finding has moreover not
been clearly replicated. Corcoran (2000) reports a series of other studies indicat-
ing that schizophrenic patients, even those with negative symptoms, suffer from a
specific deficit in advanced theory of mind tasks only.
As discussed in the preceding section, Happ (1993) has linked autistic sub-
jects theory of mind difficulties with their inability to understand metaphor and
irony. Langdon et al. (2002) have tried to replicate these results with schizophren-
ic patients. Their results confirm that the interpretation of metaphor and irony re-
quires different kinds of cognitive processes. However, even though many of their
subjects had difficulties understanding both metaphors and irony, they concluded
that only the interpretation of irony required real mentalizing abilities and could
be related to theory of mind problems. According to the authors, failure to under-
stand metaphors is due to another kind of cognitive deficit, related to the general
ability to use context to construct appropriate concepts. As discussed in Chapter2

(Section 2.3.1), many authors have put forward arguments against the idea that
metaphor comprehension requires first-order mindreading abilities. This analysis
is therefore fully in agreement with this new trend of thought.
Langdon et al. (just like Frith and Corcoran) do not conclude from their re-
sults that schizophrenic patients suffer form a similar theory of mind deficit as the
one found in autism. Autistic subjects suffer from a generalized deficit in mental
state attribution, noticeable for instance by the absence of mental state terms in
their vocabulary. On the other hand, schizophrenic patients have a basic ability to
represent other peoples beliefs and are perfectly able to use mental state terms ap-
propriately. In conclusion, what seems to be lacking in schizophrenia is the ability
to attribute mental states to others in a specific context. According to Langdon et
al., this problem explains why they have problems understanding irony, because
it requires the ability to identify a speakers tacitly dissociative attitude towards his
utterance depending on his mental states at a given time. It is also worth mention-
ing that during phases of paranoid delirium, what characterizes schizophrenic
patients is not the absence of mental state attribution but rather the excessive and
often unjustified attribution of negative mental states to others.
To conclude, the two studies presented above indicate that schizophrenic pa-
tients suffer from a certain form of acquired deficit in theory of mind, but this
deficit isnt comparable to the one observed in autism. This difference is partially
due to the fact that schizophrenic patients retain some elementary abilities which
they acquired normally during their infancy whereas autistic children do not de-
velop these abilities normally from the start. Moreover, results obtained by Frith
and Corcoran on patients with negative symptoms also tend to indicate that the
theory of mind deficit in schizophrenia might be a surface manifestation of a
more general cognitive impairment than the one found in autism. Another expla-
nation provided by Corcoran et al. (1995) is that patients with negative symptoms
might have had poor social functioning in childhood. This might explain why
these patients have problems even with first-order theory of mind tasks, but not
why they fail all the control questions in addition to the test questions.
3.5.2 Right hemisphere damage
Clinical studies with patients suffering from a localized lesion in the right hemi-
sphere systemically reveal an inability to draw inferences during a conversation
and to enrich utterances in order to understand the speakers meaning in context.
Moreover, these patients have great difficulties to understand indirect speech acts.
Because of their communication deficits, these patients also form an interesting
group to investigate in relation to theory of mind.
Surian and Siegal (2001) assessed the ability of a group of patients with right-
hemisphere damage and another with left-hemisphere damage to pass first-order
theory of mind tests and to understand when a maxim of conversion had been vi-
olated. Their results show that patients with right-hemisphere damage had much
more difficulty spotting maxim violations than the others. Moreover, the same
patients also had more difficulty than the others with the false belief task. How-
ever, in their case too, these problems might well be due to a different deficit than
the one observed in autism. Two facts illustrate this difference.
First, patients suffering from right-hemisphere damage were able to pass false
belief tests when the question was made more explicit, specifically when the ques-
tion was phrased as Where will Sally look first for her ball? instead of just look.
Moreover, when the test was accompanied by visual clues, their performance con-
siderably improved as well. In these respects, these patients are closer to normally
developing three-year-olds than to autistic children. The second interesting find-
ing is that those of the subjects who failed at the false belief task also gave the
wrong answers to the control questions. This seems to indicate that, like patients
with schizophrenia, they suffer from a more generalized cognitive deficit, possibly
related to short-term memory and attention.
Winner et al. (1998) have assessed the ability of patients with right-hemisphere
damage to understand communicative situations typically associated with ad-
vanced theory of mind abilities like irony and lies. Their results indicate that pa-
tients suffering from right-hemisphere damage have great difficulty distinguishing
lies from irony and also fail at advanced versions of the false belief task. However,
they also reveal important individual differences between the patients.
In conclusion, lack of theory of mind abilities in right-hemisphere damage
and schizophrenia seem to be clearly demonstrated only for second-order (ad-
vanced) theory of mind tasks. Cases of failure at first-order tasks cannot reliably
be attributed to a lack of theory of mind abilities, since these subjects also fail to
answer the control questions correctly, which is not the case in autism.
3.6 Summary
The first three chapters of this book have focused on the link between theory of
mind abilities and verbal communication, and its application to the domains of
language acquisition and developmental pathologies. The arguments presented
in these chapters tend to confirm the close link between pragmatics and theory
of mind. Specifically, I argued that communication problems often go together
with problems in mental state attribution, especially in complex situations such
as irony. This link is also found in normally developing children, who do not
nderstand irony or lies before the development of advanced mentalizing abili-

u
ties, as will be demonstrated empirically in Chapter 7.
The presentation of autism in this chapter has provided further evidence to
refine the relation between pragmatics and theory of mind. First, I have argued
that the hypothesis of a theory of mind deficit did not account for the whole array
of communicative impairments found in autism. A number of these difficulties
come from autistic subjects inability to integrate contextual information, and can
be accounted for by the weak central coherence hypothesis. The importance of
context for verbal communication is also noticeable in other pathologies. Schizo-
phrenic patients do not have a generalized deficit in mental state attribution but
are nevertheless unable to identify appropriate mental states in context. All these
findings confirm the crucial role of the two elements discussed in this chapter for
successful verbal communication: the ability to reason about other peoples men-
tal states and the ability to integrate contextual information from many different
sources. I will argue in Chapter 6 that taken together, these two impairments also
account for autistic subjects deficient use of discourse connectives.
In this chapter and the preceding one, I have compared theory of mind abili-
ties of normally developing and autistic children because both groups fail false
belief tests. The data presented revealed however that the reasons for failing were
very different in the two cases. First, normally developing three-year-olds already
understand that people can have true beliefs, use mental state terms like know and
believe and understand axioms such as seeing is believing. All these abilities are lack-
ing in autistic children. Second, normally developing children start to understand
the concept of pretence shortly after 18 months. This is again not the case for autis-
tic children. In sum, autistic children do not fail the false belief tests because they
have a developmental delay maintaining them at the level of normally developing
three-year-olds but because of a more complex theory of mind impairment.
In the last section of the chapter, I have presented arguments showing that,
even if theory of mind abilities seem to be lacking in other populations such as
schizophrenia and right-hemisphere damage, the causes for failing false belief
tests are different in each case. As argued in Chapter 1, passing the false belief test
requires a range of abilities in various domains such as language and executive
control, in addition to mindreading. Failure at the test can therefore not exclu-
sively be attributed to a lack of theory of mind abilities.
In conclusion, it seems that it is only within the autistic population that the
majority of subjects has a deep and generalized deficit in the domain of theory of
mind. For that reason, this population is the best-suited for investigation of the
relationship between verbal communication and theory of mind, thanks to the
experiments that assess the impact of theory of mind deficits on communication.
chapter 4
Language as a window into childrens

developing theory of mind
In the first three chapters, I have argued that language, communication and the-
ory of mind are related in many complex and intricate ways. In the remainder
of this book, I expand on one particular kind of relationship between language
and theory of mind. More specifically, I will explore the possibility that the mas-
tery of some linguistic elements is intrinsically related to mentalizing abilities,
either because they are dedicated to the communication of mentalizing concepts
or because they provide the necessary syntactic structures to communicate them.
Therefore, the acquisition of these linguistic items and structures can be taken as
a mirror, in their language, of childrens developing theory of mind abilities.
In this chapter, I will first review the linguistic elements that have been previ-
ously investigated in relation to theory of mind. In English, they are mostly found
at the lexical level and include the categories of evidentials (4.1.1), modal verbs
(4.1.2) and mental state verbs (4.1.3). In the domain of syntax (4.1.4), talking about
mental states requires the linguistic ability to deal with complex clauses. The ques-
tion is what kind of complex structures (if any) might be relevant as a reflection of
childrens mentalizing abilities. As discussed in Chapter 2 (Section2.3.2.2), some
authors think that tensed complement clauses provide a unique tool for represent-
ing mental states because it is only in this structure that the embedded clause can
have a different truth value from the main clause. However, at a more general and
universal level, forming thoughts about mental states involves the cognitive ability
of metarepresentation. The metarepresentation of a proposition into a higher-level
one requires an embedding process similar to the syntactic mechanism of em-
bedding. Some authors have therefore explored the possibility that the mastery of
all complex clauses requiring embedding could be related to the development of
theory of mind abilities. I will present studies providing arguments for both sides
of this debate and also briefly show that some uses of other structures like condi-
tionals can have a special relationship to theory of mind abilities as well.
The second part of the chapter includes a critical discussion on the acquisi-
tion, in English and other languages, of the lexical items and syntactic structures
previously reviewed in the chapter. The rationale for comparing English with other
languages like Turkish and Korean lies in the different encodings of evidential
information in various languages. Results of comparative studies tend to confirm
the universal influence of theory of mind on their acquisition, independently of

the way they are encoded in a given language. Overall, the main conclusions and
methodological issues raised in this chapter will serve as a point of comparison
for the empirical studies on the acquisition of causal connectives presented in
Chapters 6 and 7, and discussed from a theoretical perspective in Chapter 5.
4.1 Theory of mind in language
4.1.1 Evidentials
The category of evidentials does not have a single and universally-accepted defini-
tion. Some authors like Aikhenvald (2004:1) treat it as a grammatical category,
whose primary meaning is information source. Aikhenvald (ibid: 5) goes on to
specify that marking information source as a grammatical category does not imply
any reference to validity or reliability of knowledge or information. In other words,
evidentiality only corresponds to the requirement, existing in about one quarter
of the worlds languages (Aikhenvald 2004), to grammatically encode the source
through which information was acquired. The grammatical system of evidential
marking can be more or less complex depending on the language. While some lan-
guages like Cherokee only distinguish between information that was acquired first-
hand or not first-hand by the speakers, others like Tariana (an Arawak language
spoken in northwest Amazonia) distinguishes between as many as five sources: vi-
sual, non-visual, sensory, inferred, assumed and reported. In striking contrast, in
most major European languages, a grammatical category of evidentials simply does
not exist. In other words, according to Aikhenvalds definition of evidentiality, this
notion cannot be studied in relation to languages like English or French.
Some other authors give yet another, broader definition of the notion of evi-
dentiality. According to Papafragou (2001a:61), the category of evidentials can
be defined as a collection of formally diverse elements whose function is to as-
sess the propositional content of an utterance in terms of its informational source
(perception, inference or hearsay) and/or the degree of speaker commitment to
that content (strong/weak)12.Similarly to the category of discourse connectives
12. Viewed from a functional standpoint, the boundary between the category of evidentials and
other categories such as modal verbs is not as straightforward as in Aikhenvalds definition. For
example, modal verbs can in some occasions convey evidential information, as indicated in Ex-
ample (4) below. The typological debate about the boundaries of the functional category of evi-
dentials falls outside the scope of this book (see Cornillie 2009 for a critical review). I have chosen
to discuss evidentials and modals independently in this chapter mainly for the sake of simplicity.
Chapter 4. Language as a window into childrens developing theory of mind 75
that I will discuss in the next chapter, evidentials thus defined constitute a func-
tional rather than a grammatical category, whose functions are to encode a source
of information but also (contrary to Aikhenvalds definition) to communicate a
certain degree of commitment towards this information. I will adopt a functional
view of evidentiality because, following this broader definition, the category of
evidentials is directly related to the possession of theory of mind abilities. Indeed,
as Papafragou and Li (2001) note: failure to evaluate sources of information
could lead to incorrect beliefs, a fact that could have dire consequences. There-
fore, being able to account for and reason about evidential relations and sources
is an essential part of human theory of mind abilities.
The interesting property of evidentials from a theory of mind perspective is
that all the possible sources of information do not create beliefs of equal strength.
According to Papafragou et al. (2007), an evidentiality scale can be established
between direct access and indirect access in terms of reliability. This scale more-
over gives rise to pragmatic effects. For example, if a speaker explicitly indicates
that he has acquired information through an inferential process, he implies that
he is less committed about its truth than if he relates it as the result of his own
direct observation. Inference is therefore always associated with a weaker degree
of speaker certainty than direct perceptual access. In sum, these two sources of in-
formation differ in the degree of speaker endorsement they imply, but they share
the property of involving only the speaker himself.
The case of hearsay involves different constraints. Attributing a piece of infor-
mation to another speaker can lead to a variable degree of endorsement, although
it seems to be in any case weaker than when acquired through direct perception.
When a speaker reports an utterance produced by somebody else, he can express
various attitudes with respect to the content he is metarepresenting. In some cases,
he simply conveys in a neutral manner the content of this utterance. In other cases
however, the speakers intention is to indicate his own propositional attitude with
respect to this utterance or thought, for example in order to shed some doubt about
its truth or to mock it. Sperber and Wilson (1986) speak about echoic uses of lan-
guage to characterize this phenomenon. I will come back to this notion in more de-
tail in Chapter 5 in the discussion of the French connective puisque (Section5.5),
which has strong echoic properties. For the purposes of the current discussion, the
important point is that the use of many hearsay markers implies both the attribu-
tion of a representation to a source different from oneself, as well as the recognition
of a certain speakers attitude towards this source. For this reason, using this kind
of hearsay markers requires an additional layer of metarepresentation.
In sum, evidentials are a functional category which enables the speaker to
provide information on two dimensions: the source of information and the de-
gree of speaker endorsement. These two dimensions are not independent, and
the type of source implies de facto a certain degree of speaker endorsement, as

summarized in Table 1.
Table 1. Relation between the source of information and the degree

of speaker endorsement
Source perception hearsay inference

Speaker endorsement strong weaker (depending on source) weaker
If the indication of a source almost always comes with an indication about the de-
gree of endorsement, the reverse is not true. In some cases, the degree of speaker
endorsement can be indicated without mentioning the source of information, as
in Examples (1) and (2) below.
(1) His so-called friend stole all his money.
(2) He apparently started to take piano lessons.
As the above examples illustrate, in English evidential information is mostly en-

coded in the lexicon. Evidentials encoding the source of information are usually
conveyed by verbs in the case of direct perception as in (3), and in addition by
modals (4), sentence adverbials (5) or fixed expressions (6) in the case of infer-
ence. Hearsay markers are also conveyed by a small number of lexical items, some
of which leave the source of the metarepresented information neutral (7) while
others make it explicit (8).
(3) I saw him walk in the garden.
(4) He must be in town.
(5) Logically, her purse is in her bag.
(6) In all likelihood, he will be at the conference tomorrow.
(7) Allegedly, he is the best pianist alive.
(8) According to Mary, John lives in England.
In addition, evidential information can also occasionally be indicated in English

through syntactic means. For example, sentence (9) indicates direct evidence for
the reported fact, while (10) indicates that the speaker had only an indirect access
to the event, and drew his conclusion by inference.
(9) I saw Mary leave.
(10) I saw that Mary had left.
In sum, English (and many other languages) offers mostly a limited and specific
number of lexical items to communicate evidential information. However, other
languages like Turkish, Korean and some Amerindian languages (especially those
spoken in Northern California) encode this information systematically in their

verbal morphology. An interest in these languages and the way they encode evi-
dential information has been the starting point for the growing body of work on
evidentiality (see for instance Chafe and Nichols 1986). Because of the way they
encode evidential information, these languages are moreover very well-suited for
acquisition studies, since children are exposed to a large amount of input and are
compelled to use evidential markers very early on. I will discuss the acquisition of
evidentiality in Turkish and Korean in the last section of this chapter (4.2.4).
4.1.2 Modal verbs
Contrary to the category of evidentials, which are intrinsically related to theory of

mind abilities because of the kind of meaning they convey, only some uses of modal
verbs require theory of mind abilities. In this respect, modal verbs are very similar
to most discourse connectives, as will be demonstrated in the next chapter.
In studies focusing on the question of modality (for example Sweetser 1990;
Papafragou 2000) two main classes of meaning are usually distinguished. On one
side is epistemic modality which indicates the speakers degree of certainty to-
wards the proposition expressed in the complement clause of the modal verb, as
illustrated in sentences (11) and (12).
(11) You must be Sophie.
(12) (The doorbell rings) It could be Peter.
This kind of modal meaning is usually opposed to deontic modality, which serves
to indicate the possibility or necessity of acts realized by morally responsible
agents, as illustrated in sentences (13) and (14).
(13) He must do this job or he will be fired.
(14) You may go if you have finished your work.
Other kinds of modal meanings include ability as in (15) and intention as in (16).
(15) Mary can swim.
(16) I will come to your party if I leave work early enough.
These two latter kinds of meanings are often grouped with deontic modality to
form the category of root modality (e.g. Papafragou 2001b). For the sake of sim-
plicity, I will also use this general term in this book, since I will only use this
category in order to compare it with epistemic modality.
The interesting property of modal verbs for the study of language and theory
of mind is that epistemic uses of these verbs intrinsically require theory of mind
abilities. As Papafragou (1998) points out, in order to use epistemic modals cor-
rectly, the speaker must be able to think about the content of his mental states.
Consider the case of the epistemic modal must in Example (11). By producing
this utterance, the speaker indicates that the state of his knowledge does not en-
able him to produce the non-modal equivalent in (17).
(17) You are Sophie.
For this reason, after accessing and processing his beliefs regarding the person in
front of him, the speaker draws a conclusion, reflecting his beliefs and entering
the scope of the modal verb must.
More specifically, according to Papafragou (2001b:175), in order to use epis-
temic modals, the speaker must understand (a) the inferential component of
the modals (broadly, the notions of compatibility and entailment which underlie
those of possibility and necessity), and (b) the premises (beliefs) required for the
inferencing. Following this definition, it appears that the use of epistemic modals
requires some kind of metacognitive reasoning very similar to theory of mind
abilities. On the other hand, the root modality does not share this property13.
The difference between the two types of modals has implications in the do-
main of language acquisition. According to Papafragou (2001b), in many different
languages, the same verbs (like must in English) are used to express both kinds
of modalities. The universal influence of theory of mind abilities could therefore
explain the order of acquisition between the two uses of a same modal verb. More
specifically, it is expected that epistemic modality will be acquired later than root
modality, at a time when children have acquired the necessary theory of mind
abilities to deal with them. I will come back to this issue in the last section of this
chapter, dedicated to the acquisition of the linguistic items related to theory of
mind abilities.
4.1.3 Words for mental states
One of the most obvious manifestations of theory of mind abilities in language is

the use of terms dedicated to talking about mental states such as beliefs and de-
sires. According to Shatz et al. (1983), in English 95% of the words used to speak
about mental states are verbs. These verbs include think, know, remember, dream,
13. Sweetser identifies a third domain of use for modal verbs, which she calls the speech-act
domain, and that involves the ability to reason about communication itself. I will provide a
detailed introduction to Sweetsers domains of use in the next chapter because they are highly
relevant for the study of discourse connectives.
believe, wonder and expect for talking about beliefs and want, wish, care and hope
for talking about desires14.
The main challenge for studies investigating the use of these verbs as a way
of reflecting peoples reasoning about mental states is that most of them notori-
ously have many different uses in conversation. For example, in their study of the
verbs know, remember, think and dream, Shatz et al. (1983) only counted verbs as
references to mental states if they referred in context to the thoughts, memories
or knowledge of an identifiable subject.
Another frequent function of these verbs is the modulation of an assertion,
when the speaker uses them to mark his degree of certainty, and to act as eviden-
tials. For example, in (18) and (19) below the mental state verbs serve to mark
the speakers higher or lower degree of certainty. Even though these uses of men-
tal state verbs are semantically different from their primary function described
above, they are also strongly related to theory of mind abilities, for the reasons
spelled out in the section on evidentials above.
(18) I think they are coming tomorrow.
(19) I know they are coming tomorrow.
The situation is however different for other common uses of these verbs. For
example, another frequent use of mental state verbs is what Gelman and Shatz
(1977) call directing the interaction, when they serve in a general way to make the
interaction smoother as in the fixed expressions you know and know what?.
In that case, all relations with theory of mind abilities are lost.
In consequence, Shatz et al. (1983) stress the importance of using context in
order to disambiguate occurrences of mental state verbs. They mention the idea
of using a paraphrase in order to reach the correct interpretation. I will argue in
Chapter 6 that the same criteria are also highly relevant for the disambiguation of
discourse connectives in empirical studies.
4.1.4 Syntax and theory of mind
From a cognitive point of view, the human ability to form metarepresentations

of thoughts, and hence to reason about mental states, shares important similari-
ties with the use of some syntactic structures, and in particular with the use of
complement clauses. When they are formulated explicitly as in Examples (20)
14. These lists were assembled by compiling verbs studied by Shatz et al. (1983) and Bartsch
and Wellman (1995).
and (21) below, metarepresentations of thoughts are indeed expressed by the use
of complement clauses.
(20) John believes that Mary speaks French fluently.
(21) Mary thinks that the chocolate is in the cupboard.
According to de Villiers (2000), complement clauses and metarepresentations of

thoughts share a fundamental property: the possibility of having an embedded
clause with a different truth value with respect to the main clause. For example,
the whole proposition uttered in (21) can be true, if such is Marys belief, whereas
the embedded clause the chocolate is in the cupboard can be false, if the chocolate
really is on the table.
In spite of this common property, the relation between the cognitive ability to
reason about thoughts and the linguistic ability to use tensed complement clauses
are not bi-univocal. First, all forms of metarepresentations do not require such
a construction to be communicated. For example, in English, verbs of desire are
expressed with an infinitival structure, as in (22) below.
(22) He wants to eat.
De Villiers (2000) interprets this difference as a confirmation that tensed comple-

ment clauses play a specific role in the development of false belief understanding,
since verbs of desire are systematically acquired before mental state verbs. How-
ever, this conclusion is highly disputable, because it implies a form of linguistic
relativism. As argued in Chapter 2 (Section 2.3.2.2), some languages like German
do not have different structures for verbs of desire and verbs of belief, but children
nevertheless acquire the concept of desire earlier than the concept of belief. More-
over, According to Dixon and Aikhenvald (2006), the majority of the worlds
languages have complement clauses. But a sizeable number lack this grammatical
construction. In these languages, people use other grammatical strategies to talk
about mental states. However, no study has as yet shown that children speaking
these languages fail to develop theory of mind abilities on schedule.
Moreover, having a theory of mind requires the ability to metarepresent
thoughts. According to Wilsons definition (2000:127), the notion of metarepre-
sentation can be defined as a representation of a representation: a higher-order
representation with a lower-order representation embedded within it. Following
this definition, it is the general syntactic property of embedding rather than a
particular structure that should be related to metarepresentational abilities. If this
hypothesis is correct, complement clauses should not be the only syntactic struc-
tures to be related to metarepresentational abilities underlying theory of mind,
given that relative clauses also imply the embedding of a proposition into another
one15. This hypothesis has direct implications for the acquisition of syntax and
theory of mind, and I will discuss it in detail in the last section of this chapter.
In conclusion, even though the syntactic process of embedding is a crucial
component for the formation of metarepresentations and therefore for the de-
velopment of theory of mind abilities, there is no one to one mapping between
syntactic structures and theory of mind.
It is also worth mentioning that certain specific uses of some syntactic struc-
tures are also closely related to theory of mind abilities. In English for example,
Sweester (1990) argues that some uses of conditionals like (23) have an epistemic
reading.
(23) If his lights are out he is at the party.
In this case, the logical if-then relation conveyed by the conditional holds between
a premise (his lights are out) and a conclusion (he is at the party). I will discuss
similar examples with uses of connectives in the next chapter.
Another case of a relation between a specific syntactic structure and theory
of mind abilities comes from a use of the conditional in French called condition-
nel de linformation incertaine (conditional marking uncertain information). This
use serves to evaluate a non-first hand information source in order to indicate a
piece of information as doubtful, particularly when acquired by hearsay (Grevisse
1980). This use of the conditional is illustrated in (24) below.
(24) Selon Marie, Jean serait Londres.
According to Marie, Jean would be in London.
In this example, the speaker explicitly indicates by use of the conditional that he
does not vouch for the information provided by Marie. The information con-
veyed by this structure therefore requires a kind of reasoning more specifically
related to theory of mind abilities. It can also be treated as a case of grammati-
calized evidentiality, or in Aikhenvalds terminology, an evidential strategy used
by French speakers.
15. From a semantic perspective, a fundamental difference between the two kinds of con-
structions is that in relative clauses, any verb can function in each clause of the construc-
tion. In complement clause constructions however, the set of verbs that can be used in the
main clause is strongly restricted and typically includes items like hear, see, believe or like.
From a syntactic perspective, the difference between the two structures is that complement
clause constructions directly embed a complement clause as a core argument of the predicate,
whereas relative clauses embed a noun phrase, with a relative clause in its modifier position
(Dixon and Aikhenvald 2006).
4.2 Acquiring the language of theory of mind
The remainder of this chapter is dedicated to a review and discussion of previ-

ous studies focusing on the acquisition of the linguistic items and syntactic con-
structions discussed in the previous sections. It opens with some methodological
considerations (4.2.1) that will be used in the following sections dealing with the
acquisition of specific linguistic items, as well as the empirical chapters of this
book (Chapters 6 and 7). As argued above, in languages like English, theory of
mind abilities are mostly reflected in the use of certain lexical items. They in-
clude, in addition to perception and mental state verbs, the functional category
of evidentials, containing mostly adverbs and a few other fixed constructions, as
well as epistemic modality. Because of their limited number and specific uses, evi-
dentials in languages like English have not been the object of systematic develop-
mental analyses, in contrast to languages which encode evidentials in their verbal
morphology. At the lexical level, developmental studies on English focus on the
acquisition of mental state verbs and epistemic modality. I will present a review
of these studies in Sections 4.2.2 and 4.2.3, before discussing the acquisition of
evidential morphology in Turkish and Korean (4.2.4). The underlying question
for these comparative studies is whether the way these notions are encoded in a
language has a determining influence on their age of acquisition. I will then turn
to the acquisition of syntactic structures that involve a process of embedding, and
compare them with childrens developing theory of mind abilities (4.2.5). At stake
here is the question of the specific role of complement clauses compared to other
forms of embedded structures in the development of mentalizing abilities. Results
from all these studies will provide a basis for comparison with the acquisition of
connectives and its relation with the development of theory of mind abilities.
4.2.1 Methodological considerations
Many empirical studies often focus either on the production or comprehension

of a given linguistic item or structure. However, it is a well-documented fact that
the development of these two abilities is not synchronous. The general pattern of
development seems to be that normally developing children understand much
more than they actually produce. However, the reverse asymmetry has also been
observed for some functional items like numbers (Bloom 2000) and articles
(Clark 2003:338339). In such cases, children do not yet have a full mastery of
these items at the onset of production. Moreover, production and comprehension
studies both have their inherent limitations, which will be briefly summarized
below. Depending on the phenomenon under investigation, one kind of study
might therefore be more revealing than another, as will be shown with concrete
examples in the next sections.
A fundamental methodological question to be addressed by acquisition stud-
ies targeting production is when is it possible to conclude that a given lexical item
or syntactic structure has been acquired on the basis of empirical observation. In
some cases, childrens first productions are erroneous or correspond to memo-
rized imitations. Sometimes, early uses are also limited to some specific contexts.
For example, a syntactic structure can be used preferentially with certain verbs or
the use of a lexical item can be limited to one of its meanings. Hence, a produc-
tion study can in some cases provide too lenient a measure of childrens linguistic
development. In order to correct for this potential bias, it is necessary to pay close
attention to context of use and to conduct a qualitative analysis of every produc-
tion, in order to ensure that only correct and creative uses are counted. Another
fundamental measure to obtain in production studies is the frequency of occur-
rences. If a significant increase is observed during a given period, this phenom-
enon certainly indicates that acquisition is taking place.
Contrary to natural production, comprehension studies are designed to en-
sure that a real mastery has been attained. However, these studies can also be too
demanding. In some cases, the experimental design used to measure comprehen-
sion requires more complex abilities than those related to the understanding of
the tested element. This criticism had notably been formulated against the false
belief task (for example by Bloom and German 2000) and it is possible that the
same bias is found in many experimental protocols.
In conclusion, whenever it is methodologically feasible, comprehension and
production of a given linguistic item or structure should be assessed simultane-
ously and compared in order to get as accurate a picture as possible of the acquisi-
tion process.
4.2.2 The acquisition of mental state terms
One of the earliest thorough observational studies of childrens use of mental

state verbs was conducted by Shatz et al.(1983). In their paper, the authors first
investigated the production of four mental state terms (remember, think, know
and dream) by a single child, recorded between the ages of 2;4 and 4;0 from the
CHILDES database16. They went on to compare the results obtained with this
16. Following a convention used in acquisition studies, when a precise age needs to be speci-
fied, the following format is used: year;month.days. For example, 2;4 means an age of two years
and four months.
particular child with language samples from 30 children collected over a six
month period. These children were chosen because their mean length of utter-
ance (MLU) closely matched that of the child in their first study at the time of the
first transcripts. In the two studies, the authors extracted and classified all occur-
rences of the target lexical items and divided them into a number of pre-defined
functions in order to discriminate real mental state uses form other common uses
(see Section 4.1.3). The authors paid special attention to what they call contrastive
uses of mental state verbs, in other words [uses] which mark an understanding of
a difference or discrepancy between some mental state and present or observable
reality. These uses are especially important because they can be assimilated to a
kind of false belief test in natural production. The authors also looked at the kind
of syntactic structures in which these verbs were used.
The main finding of these two studies is that children start to produce
mental state verbs shortly after their second birthday (on average around 2;3).
However, these first uses did not reflect genuine understanding of the mind but
were part of fixed phrases like you know or what do you think?. The first
genuine uses (including contrastive uses) were produced during the second half
of their third year. From a quantitative perspective, the longitudinal study fo-
cusing on a single child indicated that the number of mental state uses of these
verbs doubled between the first and the second half of the fourth year. The two
studies also confirmed that childrens production of mental state verbs was not
delayed by linguistic limitations. At the lexical level, they were able to use these
words with other functions not related to theory of mind abilities at least some
months before referring to mental states. From a syntactic perspective, children
were able to use quite complex structures involving wh or that complements
even before producing mental state terms. Finally, as far as the role of parental
input is concerned, the authors found that only 10% of the childs mental state
productions (in the first study) immediately followed the use of the same verb
by a parent. This observation tends to confirm that mental state uses of these
verbs were not mere imitations17.
The study by Shatz et al. (1983) provides a first overview of childrens de-
veloping abilities to talk about mental states. However, it has been the subject
of a number of criticisms. Bartsch and Wellman (1995) argue that the initial
focus on one single child provides too limited a picture of the general acquisi-
tion process. They state moreover that childrens contrastive uses of mental state
terms in the corpus were too limited to provide a really fine-grained analysis for
17. The fact that most uses are creative does not mean that input does not play a role in this
acquisition. I have stressed in Chapter 2 (Section 2.3.2) the importance of mothers explanations
for theory of mind development (Peterson and Slaughter 2003).
the study of childrens mentalizing abilities. Finally, they observe that a study of
mental state terms should also include verbs used to talk about desires and not
be limited to belief verbs.
Bartsch and Wellmans own study included observational data with 10 differ-
ent children from the CHILDES database, recorded on average from the age of
two to five years. In accordance with Shatz et al., they found that children produce
their first belief verbs like think, know and wonder shortly after their second birth-
day. They moreover also note that these first uses correspond to fixed and idiom-
atic phrases rather than genuine references to mental states. Genuine references
appeared around childrens third birthday, and contrastive uses appeared as soon
as real mental states references themselves were used. As far as verbs of desire
such as want, wish and care were concerned, children started to produce them
earlier than mental state verbs, during the second half of their third year. As for
belief verbs, early uses already encompassed a large variety of uses, demonstrating
genuine understanding of this psychological state.
Bartsch and Wellman conclude that children go through three phases in
their ability to talk about the mind. In the first phase they only talk about desires.
Around their second birthday they start a second phase, and begin to talk about
beliefs and thoughts as well. However, during this phase, they still talk about de-
sires more often than about beliefs and thoughts and are only able to explain ac-
tions in terms of desire. During the third phase, beginning around the age of four,
children are increasingly able to refer to thoughts and beliefs. They do not only
attribute beliefs to people, but also understand that beliefs are crucial to explain
the reasons why people do things. The authors note that the discrepancy between
the onset of verbs of desire on the one hand and beliefs and thoughts on the other
cannot be attributed to lack of input or vocabulary of belief terms.
From a theoretical perspective, it should be noted that the framework under-
lying Bartsch and Wellmans study is a theoretical conception of theory of mind
abilities (the theory theory models were explained in Chapter 1, Section 1.1.3).
In accordance to this model, they conclude that, at first, children are able to rea-
son about desires but lack a concept of belief. In their words (1995:111):
If children did not conceive of persons as having thoughts, beliefs, and knowl-
edge, then in spite of hearing and even using words like think and know, in spite
of possessing the language competence to talk about beliefs, in spite of talking
about desires, in spite of hearing adults talk of beliefs often and systematically,
they could not genuinely refer to thoughts and beliefs.
These results are however not incompatible with a modular account either. In
that respect, the only difference between the accounts is that the developmental
processes underlying the acquisition of these concepts is seen as constrained by
maturational processes rather than environmental factors conditioning the con-

struction of a theory.
In sum, both the observational studies described above are in agreement in
their conclusions that children start to make genuine references to mental states
around the age of three and keep on progressing in this acquisition during their
fourth year of life. Even though these studies took considerable methodological
care to ensure that childrens production reflected a real understanding of these
items, they were limited to observational data, and none of them assessed chil-
drens understanding using other empirical methods.
Lastly, it is worth mentioning that in a study with autistic children, Tager-
Flusberg (2000) found that autistic childrens speech was devoid of belief terms
and contained only infrequent mention of emotions, desires and intentions. This
finding can be interpreted as yet another manifestation of autistic childrens lack
of theory of mind abilities.
4.2.3 The acquisition of modal verbs
In many languages, root and epistemic modalities are both expressed by the use
of the same verbs (such as can or must in English). In consequence, studies on
the acquisition of modal verbs compare both the order of acquisition between
modal verbs and between the various modalities of the same verb. In order to
compare the complexity of the two kinds of modal meanings, it is however pref-
erable to compare only the order of emergence of the two uses for a single verb.
In addition to the cognitive complexity related to the expression of modality, the
order of acquisition of various modal verbs also depends on other factors such as
the syntactic complexity of the relation expressed and register level (Papafragou
1998:386387). I will argue in the following chapters that similar criteria also in-
fluence the order of acquisition between various French causal connectives.
Many studies have assessed the order of acquisition between root and epis-
temic modalities by looking at childrens early productions of these items. Accord-
ing to Papafragous synthesis (1998:377): the data seem to converge on the point
that the onset of epistemic modality follows that of that of root modality, and
typically appears around or after the third year. More specifically, studies focus-
ing on English indicate that the first productions of modal verbs occur between
the ages of two and two-and-a-half years. At this age, they mostly serve to express
possibility and permission, in other words modality in the root domain. It is only
around the age of two-and-a-half years that the very first epistemic uses of modals
are produced, but their frequency remains quite limited until the age of three to
three-and-a-half years. Papafragou also notes that the use of some modals like
ought to, implying specific problems related to register, are produced much later,
and are not acquired before six to twelve years. Papafragou also reviews numerous
production studies on various languages such as Greek and Chinese. In all these
languages, the root modality is acquired before the epistemic modality.
Some studies (Hirst and Weil 1982; Byrnes and Duff 1989; Noveck et al.
1996) have also examined the acquisition of modality from the perspective
of comprehension. However, their results contradict the naturalistic observa-
tions described above. First, they consistently find that epistemic modality is
understood before deontic modality. Second, they conclude that children are
not able to understand the difference in the degree of speakers commitment
depending on the epistemic modal used before the age of five. For example, by
that age, children understand that must conveys greater certainty than should,
that conveys in turn greater certainty than may, etc. According to Papagragou
(2001b:175), the late comprehension of epistemic modality is due to constraints
external to the development of theory of mind abilities. She argues that in or-
der for the full content of an epistemic interpretation to be acquired, the child
needs to be in a position to grasp the logical potential of the modals as well
as their mentalistic concepts. In some cases, this logical potential can be very
complex and considerably delay the age of acquisition. The same line of reason-
ing also explains the late comprehension of the deontic modality, that typically
requires the understanding of complex logical notions.
In view of all this evidence, Papafragou (1998:382) concludes that: experi-
mental evidence has been less illuminating than naturalistic studies as to the
acquisition of root and epistemic aspects of modals. She also comments else-
where (2001b:175) that even though the use of observational data alone is not
unproblematic, the cross-linguistic regularity in the acquisition pattern of mo-
dality offers more than suggestive evidence for the theory of mind hypothesis
for epistemics.
In sum, in view of the observational studies described above, it is likely that
the development of epistemic modality goes hand in hand with childrens devel-
oping theory of mind abilities, in the course of childrens fourth year. Papafragou
(1998) notes therefore that the first uses of epistemic modals around two-and-a-
half years do not reflect a thorough understanding of their underlying mental-
izing properties, just like in the case of mental state verbs. Finally, Papafragou
and Li (2001) observe that the relation between theory of mind and modality
is already noticeable in earlier stages of acquisition. In many languages, the first
modal notions expressed in childrens speech correspond to physical ability and
volition. In English for example, volition and intention, expressed by the use of
the modal will, rely on the concept of desire, one of the main precursors to rea-
soning about beliefs.
4.2.4 The acquisition of evidential morphology
Before turning to specific languages, it is worth noting that many studies have
assessed childrens ability to monitor their source of beliefs independently of
their language skills. As mentioned in Chapter 2 (Section 2.2), the recognition
that various sources of information can lead to the creation of beliefs is part of
childrens developing mentalizing abilities. The existing data suggest the follow-
ing course of development.
By the age of three, children understand that seeing leads to knowing, as
demonstrated for example in a study by Pratt and Bryant (1990). These authors
showed three-year-old children a scene in which two characters were alternatively
holding a container. One of them was holding it while the other could see what
was inside. Three-year-old children knew that the one who would know what was
inside the container was the one who was looking inside it. Later on, there seems
to be a significant improvement in childrens ability to assess the source of their
beliefs between the age of three and four (ONeill and Gopnik 1991). Whitcombe
and Robinson (2000) however tested three- to five-year-old children and found
that even when children were able to choose the correct source to believe when
two contradictory options were presented, they couldnt correctly report the ex-
act source of their belief. This result provides yet another example of discrepancy
between the implicit understanding of a phenomenon and its explicit verbaliza-
tion. Verbal information seems to be a more complex source of belief than direct
perception. Wimmer and Hogrefe (1988) found for example that three- and four-
year-old children have difficulty understanding that a person informed verbally
about the content of a box will know what is inside it. Finally, Sodian and Wim-
mer (1987) found that children under the age of six fail to understand that a belief
can be acquired through inference.
In sum, children understand by the age of three that direct perception can
lead to the formation of beliefs. Later on during their preschool years, they un-
derstand that other sources like hearsay and inference can provide similar bases
for beliefs. This discrepancy can be attributed to the varying degree of speaker
endorsement: strong in the case of direct perception and weaker in the other two
cases, as illustrated in Table 1 in Section 4.1.1.
As mentioned in Section 4.1.1, some languages encode evidential informa-
tion in their verbal morphology. For example, in Turkish and Korean, the use
of evidential suffixes is compulsory for all past-tense uses of verbs. The very fre-
quent use of these suffixes makes it possible to study their early acquisition by
children.Data on the acquisition of evidentiality in languages with an even more
complex system of evidentials than Turkish or Korean like Tariana is unfortunate-
ly lacking, but anecdotal evidence reported in Aikhenvald (2004:362363) seems
to indicate that the system of evidentiality is acquired rather late by children

speaking these languages.
In the case of Turkish, Aksu-Ko (1988) has studied the acquisition of two ev-
idential suffixes, -d and -m, whose function is to indicate a difference between
knowledge gained through direct perception or through indirect means. In order
to assess the production of these suffixes, Aksu-Ko showed three- to six-year-old
children a series of illustrated short stories. In one of them, children saw an event
take place, such as the popping of a balloon. In the other, the same event wasnt
directly visible for the children but they could deduce it because of the final result
described in the story (e.g. the popped balloon). Children were asked to tell what
had just happened. Results indicate that by the age of three, children preferentially
use the suffix of direct visual perception when they see the event happening and
the suffix marking indirect perception in the other cases, but it is only after the age
of four that they use the two suffixes in a totally reliable manner.
In order to check that the production of suffixes reflected a genuine under-
standing of evidentiality, Aksu-Ko also set up a second experiment, in which
a puppet was telling a story to the children using one of the two suffixes. After
hearing the story, children had to say if the puppet had really seen the event
described or if it heard it from someone else. Results indicate that it is only at
the age of four years that children are able to use the information contained in
the evidential suffixes reliably in order to answer the question. It is also worth
noting that children performed better with the direct perception marker than
with the indirect one. This accords with the studies summarized above, indicat-
ing that children are able to reason earlier on the basis of direct perception than
on hearsay or inference.
Choi (1995) has also tested the acquisition of evidential morphology by
Korean-speaking children. As is the case for Turkish, the use of evidential suf-
fixes is compulsory in order for a sentence to be well-formed. Results of her
longitudinal study show somewhat surprisingly that Korean children start to use
these suffixes much earlier than in the study on Turkish. In her data, the suf-
fix marking direct visual perception (-e) is acquired around 1;10 and the suffix
marking indirect access (-tay) is mastered by the age of three. However, more
recent work on Korean tends to shed some doubt on these findings. In a series
of experiments, Papafragou et al. (2007) tested the ability of three and four year
old Korean-speaking children to understand the semantics of relations encoded
in Korean evidential suffixes, as well as their ability to recognize various kinds of
evidential sources. The ability to reason about evidential sources has also been
tested on English-speaking children of the same age. Results indicate that before
the age of four, Korean-speaking children are able to produce many evidential
suffixes but that their understanding of these elements remains fragile. These
children are also able to reason non-verbally about the various kinds of eviden-
tial sources, just like English-speaking children of the same age range.
In sum, results from the Turkish and Korean studies are not fully conver-
gent. In the case of Turkish, the suffixes seem to be fully mastered only around
the age of four, as indicated by data from both comprehension and produc-
tion. On the other hand, Chois study seems to indicate that Korean children
master evidential suffixes as young as three but these results are not confirmed
by the later study by Papafragou et al. In order to understand the significance
of these results, it is useful to place them in the more general framework of
the debate on the influence of language for theory of mind development. As
Papafragou (2001a) notes, results from the Turkish study seem to indicate that
it is childrens cognitive development that sets the pace for their lexical acquisi-
tion. Indeed, Turkish children acquire evidential morphology at the same age as
English-speaking children acquire mental state terms and epistemic modality.
For each of these items, production begins around the age of three and contin-
ues to develop in the course of childrens fourth year. Therefore, whether chil-
dren acquire a language encoding evidentiality in a few lexical items like Eng-
lish or a language with a whole system of evidential suffixes like Turkish, the age
of acquisition of their mentalizing abilities is similar in both cases. Results from
the Korean study by Choi seem however to point to the opposite conclusion. If
Korean children did acquire evidentiality earlier than children whose mother
tongue does not encode this information in a systematic manner in their ver-
bal morphology, the hypothesis that language sets the pace for theory of mind
development would become the more plausible one. However, results from this
study were not replicated in later work, given that Papafragou et al. found that
Korean childrens understanding of evidential suffixes remained fragile until the
age of four. All in all, the majority of results presented in this section tend to
confirm the universal influence of theory of mind development for the acquisi-
tion of evidentiality.
4.2.5 The acquisition of embedded structures
According to de Villiers (2000), the acquisition of complement clauses provides

children not only with the linguistic but also with the conceptual tools necessary
to master the concept of false belief, because of the possibility they offer to embed
one proposition into another which has a different truth value. If this hypothesis
is correct, the acquisition of complement clauses should be strongly correlated
with the ability to pass a false belief test. Several studies provide confirmation for
this hypothesis.
De Villiers and Pyers (2002) have compared the age of acquisition of several
linguistic abilities including the understanding of complement clauses in three-
to five-year-old children. They found that the ability to understand this structure
was strongly correlated with the ability to pass a false belief test. De Villiers and
Pyers do not provide explicit information regarding the exact age of acquisition
for complement clauses. However, given the strong correlation observed with the
age of success at the false belief task, it can be roughly situated around the age of
four. Besides, de Villiers (2007) also observes that it is around the age of four that
children are able to extract complements from a wh-question context (see below).
De Villiers and Pyers (2002:1038) note however that children are already able
to understand some complement clauses between the ages of three and four years
when the structure includes a communication verb like say. This observation lead
them to hypothesize that children could be using their knowledge of communica-
tion verbs to understand the meaning of mental state verbs, since both verbs rely
on the same syntactic structure. However, their results did not provide data that
directly confirmed this hypothesis, and they concluded that this possibility re-
mained to be explored. Moreover, as argued in Chapter 2 (Section 2.3.2.2), these
results have since been the target of many criticisms, mainly because of the form
of linguistic relativism they imply. It is worth mentioning however that results
similar to those of de Villiers and Pyerss study have also been found with other
populations. In a longitudinal study of children with autism, Tager-Flusberg and
Joseph (2005) found that the best predictor of success at the false belief task was
the understanding of complement clauses with communication verbs. Another
study on language impaired children (P. de Villiers et al. 2003) found the same
relationship using a very large cross-sectional sample. Finally, as mentioned in
Chapter 2 (Section 2.3.2.1), studies with deaf children also found an improvement
on false belief reasoning after intensive training with complement clauses.
The studies I have just presented concentrate exclusively on the acquisition
of complement clauses, because this is the only structure that has the property
of embedding a proposition with a different truth value from the main clause.
However, as mentioned above, it is not certain that this property is the most im-
portant one for the acquisition of theory of mind abilities. According to Smith et
al. (2003), the determining factor might also be the more general syntactic prop-
erty of embedding. If this hypothesis is correct, all embedded syntactic structures
should be correlated with the development of theory of mind abilities.
In order to check their hypothesis empirically, Smith et al. assessed the link be-
tween success at the false belief tests and understanding of relative clauses. Similar-
ly to complement clauses, relative clauses involve an embedding process. However,
contrary to complement clauses, they do not allow the embedding of a clause with
a different truth value. In their experiment with three- and four-year-old children,
Smith et al. compare the acquisition of relative clauses in sentences describing a

single event (25), in sentences describing two events (26), and coordinated struc-
tures (27):
(25) The girl kicked the man that is fat.
(26) The girl kicked the man that jumped over the wall.
(27) The girl kicked the man and the dog chased the ball.
During the experiment, children heard the three types of sentences spoken aloud
while seeing the experimenters act out the events described. In some cases, the
experimenters correctly replicated the link described in the sentence while in
other cases the link was not correctly replicated. The evaluation method used was
a truth value judgment task.
According to Smith et al., only relative sentences embedding two different
events like (26) require real metarepresentational abilities. The authors argue that
sentences embedding one single event like (25) are semantically equivalent to
non-embedded sentences. In the case of sentence (25), its semantic equivalent
is the girl kicked the fat man. In consequence, the fact that children understand
such sentences does not necessarily mean that they are able to process embedded
clauses. By contrast, a sentence like (26) can have two different readings. If it is
understood like a relative clause, the second event presented (he jumped over the
wall) takes place before the first event (the girl kicked the man). If it is understood
as a coordinated construction, the order of two events is reversed (the girl kicked
the man and then he jumped over the wall). By asking children to evaluate the ac-
curacy of the sentence they see enacted with puppets, it is possible to check which
of the two interpretations they have understood. Coordinated constructions like
(27) were used as controls, because they also contain two clauses but do not re-
quire an embedding process.
Results obtained in this study indicate a positive correlation between the abil-
ity to understand relative clauses and success at false belief tests. However, no cor-
relation has been found with coordinated clauses, which confirms the role of the
syntactic process of embedding for the development of theory of mind abilities.
In this study, three-year-old children were able to understand coordinated clauses
and well as relative clauses with a single event. However, they did not understand
relative clauses describing two events. On average, four-year-old children had ac-
quired both forms of relative clauses. Smith et al. conclude that only four-year-old
children possess the necessary metarepresentational abilities for his task, and that
the same ability also enables them to pass false belief tests.
De Villiers (2004) has however criticized this conclusion on the grounds that
[this study] did not pit success on relative clauses against complements as pre-
dictors. She goes on to argue that when this has been done (for example in Hale
and Tager-Flusberg 2003), complements were stronger predictors than relative

clauses. De Villiers provides an alternative explanation for the influence of relative
clauses found by Smith et al. She argues that in fact, a great many changes occur in
childrens linguistic and cognitive abilities between the ages of three and five years
and this may cause some inter-correlations to be found amongst tasks. In the case
of relative clauses, she notes that there may be some overlapping component of
linguistic or memory skill involved across relatives and complements. However,
this explanation is not fully satisfactory either. Since complement clauses are the
linguistic means used to communicate false beliefs, it is to be expected that the
ability to use this structure should be the strongest predictor of theory of mind
abilities. But this correlation does not imply that the relation observed by Smith
et al. between relative clauses and theory of mind abilities is simply due to general
linguistic and memory abilities. Indeed, in the experiment, no such correlation
was found with coordinated structures, that also require the hearer to deal with
complex clauses. In view of this result, it seems more reasonable to conclude that
the cognitive faculty of embedding is correlated with the development of theory
of mind abilities, but that this correlation is stronger when dealing with the struc-
tures used to communicate false beliefs (complement clauses) than with other
embedded clauses like relative clauses.
All the studies reviewed above exclusively investigated the comprehension
of embedded clauses. As far as the production of these structures is concerned,
a longitudinal study by Diessel (2004) indicates that children start to produce
both kinds of structures shortly after their second birthday18. Another indication
comes from the study by Shatz et al. (1983) on the acquisition of mental state
verbs. These authors found that children produced complex clauses around the
age of two, before their first uses of mental terms. Bloom et al. (1989) have also
studied the acquisition of complex sentences with perception and epistemic verbs
in natural speech for four children and found that the acquisition of complemen-
tation began between the ages of two and three years.
In the case of syntactic structures, studying production alone however has
many limitations. First, a similar construction can be rendered more or less com-
plex depending on a series of syntactic and semantic factors like the kind of verb
used and the syntax of the complement clause. It is therefore to be expected that
the first productions of complex clauses do not reflect a full mastery of these
structures, as measured in experimental settings. Diessel and Tomasello (2001)
have stressed that the first uses of complement clauses did not really contain two
separate propositions. As summarized by Tomasello (2003:250):
18. Diessel does not indicate explicitly the age of acquisition for these structures. It can how-
ever be inferred on the basis of the examples he provides.
Children [at the beginning of production] seemed to be using psychological verbs

in very short and formulaic clauses such as I think, I know P, and See if P almost
always to express their own attitude toward the contents of the other clause or
else to draw another persons attention to the contents of the other clause.
In other words, their productions did not reflect a genuine use of complementa-
tion. De Villiers (2004) also observes that caution is necessary before attributing
full mastery of the embedded structure on the basis of such productions. She
points out that three-year-old children who produce embedded clauses fail to
extract the correct complement in a wh-question context. For example, in her
experiment, children heard stories like the following:
(28) The mom said she bought apples, but look, she really bought oranges. What
did the Mom say she bought?
Three-year-old children answer oranges but four-year-olds correctly answer ap-

ples. This finding is in agreement with Diessel and Tomasellos observation that first
productions often do not correspond to a real embedding of two distinct clauses.
To summarize, the production of embedded structures starts during childrens
third year, but initial occurrences seem to be limited to some specific verbs and
contexts. Full mastery of the semantic meaning of these structures, as measured
through comprehension studies, seems to emerge around childrens fourth birthday
and to be correlated with the development of full-fledged theory of mind abilities.
4.3 Summary
In this chapter, I have provided a survey of all the lexical items and syntactic
structures that have been used in the literature as windows to look into childrens
developing theory of mind abilities.
The main conclusion emerging from these studies is that children start pro-
ducing the lexical items related to theory of mind around the age of three. How-
ever, it is also quite possible that these first uses do not yet reflect a full grasp of
their semantic and pragmatic properties, since the same children often fail com-
prehension tasks involving these items until the age of four or even five years. It
should also be pointed out that, from a quantitative point of view, production
itself undergoes important changes in the course of the fourth year. Often the
use of these items becomes much more frequent during the second half of the
fourth year. This pattern of development points to the necessity of studying pro-
duction and comprehension separately. It also illustrates the fact that the usual or-
der of acquisition, where comprehension is said to precede production by several
months, might in this case be reversed. Indeed children understand more words
than those they produce and understand some syntactic relations even when they
are at the isolated word phase (see Chapter 2). But this order seems to be reversed
for some other categories like articles, numbers or indeed the categories studied
in this chapter in relation to theory of mind.
In the domain of syntax, theory of mind abilities seem to be strongly related
to the ability to embed propositions. It is even quite plausible that mastery of
tensed complement clauses closely parallels the development of the ability to rea-
son explicitly about mental states, because they enable children to speak about
false beliefs. However, this fact does not necessarily imply that the causal influ-
ence goes from syntax to theory of mind abilities as de Villiers suggests.
Lastly, the acquisition studies reviewed in this chapter provide negative evi-
dence for the hypothesis of linguistic determinism in the development of theory
of mind abilities. At a syntactic level, the use of complement clauses does not
influence the acquisition of mental state verbs. At the lexical level, the manner of
encoding evidential information in various languages, be it verbal morphology or
the lexicon, does not influence the age of acquisition for non-linguistic evidential
reasoning either.
chapter 5
Discourse connectives and theory of mind
In this chapter, I will argue that discourse connectives are a uniquely well-suited
class of linguistic items to study in relation to theory of mind abilities, similarly
to the categories of mental state verbs, evidentials and modality reviewed in the
last chapter. The first point of contact between discourse connectives and theory
of mind is related to the domains in which connectives can be used. The main
proposal put forward is that uses of connectives in the epistemic domain, in other
words uses that involve the relationship between a premise and a conclusion, re-
quire theory of mind abilities. The second point of convergence between connec-
tives and theory of mind abilities comes from the specific meaning of some con-
nectives, that requires the manipulation of mentalizing concepts. In consequence,
all uses of such connectives require theory of mind abilities. The French causal
connective puisque is a case in point, and I will discuss its relations with theory of
mind abilities as an illustration of this phenomenon.
The chapter opens with a review of the various models proposed in the lit-
erature to deal with the notion of domains of use (5.1). I will start with the model
proposed by Sweetser (1990) because I chose to adopt her tripartite distinction. I
will also present alternative proposals from the literature and discuss the reasons
why I rejected them. I will then spell out in details a model of connective use
based on cognitive abilities (5.2), with an emphasis on the relationship between
theory of mind and connective uses. However, the differences between domains
of use are not solely attributable to theory of mind abilities and I will discuss the
different kinds of pragmatic processes involved in the use of connectives in each
domain. This analysis of domains of use leads to the formulation of several pre-
cise, testable hypotheses regarding the order of acquisition between domains of
use (5.3), which will be put to the test in a corpus study focusing on the French
causal connective parce que in Chapter 6. In Section 5.4, I will discuss the pos-
sibility of using the three French causal connectives car, parce que and puisque in
the three domains of use distinguished in Section 5.2 by way of an introduction to
this empirical work. I will close the chapter by focusing more specifically on the
connective puisque (5.5), and argue that because of the nature of its procedural
meaning, all uses of this connective require theory of mind abilities, and in some
cases even advanced (second-order) abilities.
5.1 The notion of domains of use
5.1.1 Sweetsers tripartite division
In her work on form-function relations, Sweetser (1990) uses a cognitive semantics

framework to study three types of linguistic phenomena: polysemy, the evolution
of lexical meaning and pragmatic ambiguity. As an illustration of these phenom-
ena, Sweetser chose several categories of lexical items and discussed polysemy
in relation to modal verbs (see Chapter 4), the evolution of lexical meaning in
relation to verbs of perception, and pragmatic ambiguity in relation to discourse
connectives and conditionals. The analyses put forward in this chapter stem more
specifically from her model of discourse connectives and their domains of use.
According to Sweetser, the various functions of a given lexical item are related
by global cognitive analogies between various domains of thought, namely: the
socio-physical (or real) world, mental states and communication. She calls these
three domains respectively the content domain, the epistemic domain and the
speech act domain. For instance, the three types of relations marked by the con-
nective because in Examples (1) to (3) below each fit into one of these domains.
(1) Max fell because Mary pushed him.
(2) Max is ill, because he didnt come to work today.
(3) Are you ready? Because we are late.
Example (1) corresponds to the socio-physical or content domain. It is indeed in

the real physical world that the fact of pushing someone leads to this person fall-
ing. Example (2) is part of the epistemic domain: the fact of not seeing someone
is a premise that leads the speaker to believe (by inference) that this person is ill
(rather than the persons illness!). This relation is therefore part of the speakers
own mental world and could be rephrased as the reason why the speaker believes
that Max is ill is that he didnt come to work today. Lastly, Example (3) is a case
of relation in the domain of speech acts. The clause following the connective (we
are late) serves as a justification for the speech act of question preceding it19. This
relation could be rephrased as the reason why the speaker asks if I am ready is
because we are late.
Sweetser notes that in addition to the connective because, the same uses are
also found for numerous other English causal and adversative connectives, as il-
lustrated in the examples below (borrowed from Sweetser 1990:7879). For every
19. All these examples also clearly fall into one of the other domains of use. However, as I will
argue in the empirical chapters of this book, real occurrences are just as often ambiguous and
could, out of context, be interpreted in several domains.
Chapter 5. Discourse connectives and theory of mind 99
number, (a) corresponds to a use in the content domain, (b) a use in the epistemic
domain and (c) a use in the speech act domain.
(4) a. The rules cannot be broken, therefore you will have two hours collecting
trash.
b. The rules cannot be broken, therefore the Dean knew some way around
them that allowed him to hire John.
c. The rules cannot be broken, therefore No.
(5) a. He heard me calling, so he came.
b. (You say hes deaf, but) he came, so he heard me calling.
c. We are in Paris, so what would you like to do on our first evening here?
(6) a. Although he could hardly walk, he came and saved my life.
b. Although he came and saved me, he hadnt heard me calling for help.
c. Although I sympathize with your problems, get the paper in tomorrow!
As these examples illustrate, many connectives can be used alternatively in all

three domains identified by Sweetser. For example, in sentence (4a), the rules
unbreakability causes the punishment in the real world, rather than in the mind
of the speaker. In (4b), it is the speakers knowledge of the rules unbreakability
that causes him to conclude by inference that the Dean knew a way around them.
This relation therefore holds in the mind of the speaker and is part of the epis-
temic domain. Lastly in sentence (4c), the rules unbreakability causes the speech
act of saying No.
The use of some connectives can however be restricted to one or two do-
mains. In consequence, Sweetsers model can also be used to make a distinction
between several connectives with a very similar apparent meaning, depending on
their domains of use. This is notably the case of the three French causal connec-
tives I will discuss in Section 5.4 and in the following chapters.
As far as the speech act domain is concerned, it is worth noting that in addi-
tion to the easily recognizable speech acts like questions and orders, connectives
can also apply to a speech act of assertion, as illustrated in Example (7) below with
the connective but. In this case, the speech act is uttered in the segment preceding
the connective (Mary is in love with you).
(7) Mary is in love with you but I didnt tell you.
In sum, according to Sweetser, connectives can be used in three different do-

mains: the content domain, the epistemic domain and the speech act domain.
One of the main contributions of Sweetsers model is to emphasize the fact that
the relations existing between the various kinds of segments linked by a connec-
tive are grounded in more general relations between various domains of human
cognition.
5.1.2 Alternative proposals
Several authors apart from Sweetser have addressed the issue of the kind of prop-
ositional content related by connectives. For example, Sanders et al. (1992) think
of the possible types of segments in terms of parameters. In their discourse analy-
sis framework, all coherence relations can be described using four primitive func-
tions called: basic operation, polarity, order of the segments and source of coherence.
This last parameter is precisely designed to address the question of domains of
use. According to this view, the source of coherence is a binary parameter, which
can either be a semantic source, if the relation bears on the propositional content
of the segments, or a pragmatic source if the relation applies to the illocutionary
force of one of the two segments20. In the case of a semantic relation, the coher-
ence is due to the fact that the events of the world described in the two segments
are perceived as coherent. Conversely, in the case of a pragmatic relation, the per-
ceived coherence follows from the recognition of the speakers communicative
intention. In this model, Example (1) above is a case of semantic relation, while
Examples (2) and (3) are both treated as cases of pragmatic relations.
The main difference between this model and Sweetsers proposal is that rela-
tions in the epistemic and speech act domains are merged into a single category
of pragmatic relations. Sanders et al. are not the only authors to have advocated
this grouping, probably on the grounds that distinctions within this group are
not general enough to license its division into two subgroups. Ross (1970) for
instance treats all epistemic uses as speech acts of assertion. However, as Sweetser
also points out (1990:80), the fact that examples such as (7) are fully acceptable
does not mean that all cases of epistemic uses should be treated as speech acts of
assertion. Indeed, there is an important distinction to be made between a relation
linking a premise to a conclusion in the mind of a speaker as in (2) and one that
bears on the fact of making a statement as in (7). Therefore, the three domains of
use must, according to her, be kept separate. In the next section I will bring addi-
tional evidence and argue that the difference between these three domains is also
substantiated by the different kinds of mentalizing abilities they require.
In their study of French connectives, Roulet et al. (1985) identified three do-
mains of use, that could be labeled as the content domain, the speech act domain
and the enunciation domain. The enunciation domain includes cases when a
connective is used to relate the act of saying something to another propositional
content. This use of the term enunciation follows from the definition provided
20. Sanders (1997) notes that the distinction between semantic and pragmatic uses roughly
corresponds to what other authors have called internal and external relations or ideational and
pragmatic relations.
in Anscombre and Ducrots (1983) work on polyphony and is illustrated in Ex-

ample (8) below.
(8) Elle est malade puisque vous vous voulez tout savoir.
She is ill, CONNECTIVE you want to know everything.
Even though the model put forward by Roulet et al. distinguishes between three
domains of use, just as in Sweetsers model, these domains do not exactly match
those proposed by Sweeter. In fact, only the content domain is similar in the two
approaches. Sweetsers epistemic uses are treated by Roulet et al. as speech acts of
assertion and included in the speech act domain, as also proposed by Sanders et
al. (1992) or Ross (1970). Moreover, the enunciation domain defined by Roulet et
al. is not a separate domain in Sweetsers classification, but is probably included in
the speech act domain, in particular for examples such as (8). However, in Roulet
et al.s definition, the enunciation domain is mostly useful to account for the uses
of one single French connective, namely puisque. In Section 5.5, I will argue that
uses of this connective do not in fact require an additional domain of use to ac-
count for them.
Verstraete (1998) has instead suggested first distinguishing between the
content and the pragmatic domains, and then considering two sub-categories of
pragmatic relations (speech act and epistemic), in order to maintain Sweetsers
precise classification while acknowledging a difference of levels between the
categories. In the next section I will also argue, on different grounds, that the
epistemic and the speech act domains do indeed share an important property,
namely the necessity to build a metarepresentation, that distinguishes them
from the content domain.
Other authors havent advocated groupings of the domains but have suggest-
ed an even more fine-grained classification than the one proposed by Sweetser.
In her work on Dutch connectives, Evers-Vermeul (2005) suggested making
Sweetsers classification more specific by adding two additional sub-categories.
More specifically, she further divided the content domain in two sub-categories,
depending on the volitional or non-volitional meaning of the relation. The second
distinction consisted in separating abductive from non-abductive relations and
was applied to both the epistemic and speech act domains. According to Evers-
Vermeul, the justification for these distinctions is that they provide a more accu-
rate and fine-grained classification of Dutch causal connectives. Similar notions
have also been applied to French connectives by Degand and Pander Maat (2003)
and Pit (2003)21. They are not used here however because the level of granularity
21. For a discussion of the culture-specific and universal aspects of causal modelling, see
S anders and Sweetser (2009).
implied by the use of additional subcategories does not seem to be required for
my purpose, which is to uncover the possible relationship between the use of con-
nectives and theory of mind. Moreover, these subcategories are not necessary to
account for the differences between the two connectives analyzed, namely parce
que and puisque.
Lastly, Pander Maat and Degand (2001) have suggested replacing Sweetsers
classification by a continuum based on the notion of subjectivity. The idea is to
use the fine-grained distinction proposed by Evers-Vermeul and to place her sub-
categories on a scale that depends on the degree of speakers involvement. Degand
and Pander Maat (1999:46) define the notion of speaker involvement in the fol-
lowing way:
Speaker involvement refers roughly to the degree to which the present speaker
plays an active role in the construal of the causal relation. Speaker involve-
ment increases, first, with the extent to which the relation concerns the evolv-
ing structure of the present discourse, that is the extent to which the relation is
located in the here-and-now of the speech situation. Second, it increases with
the number and strength of the assumptions the speaker is committed to in
using a particular relation.
From that perspective, a non-volitional content relation requires a minimal de-

gree of involvement on the part of the speaker whereas at the other end of the
scale, a speech act relation is always extremely subjective. The main advantage of
this proposal is that it can account for the fact that some connectives seem to take
an intermediate position between two categories (for instance the content and
epistemic categories in the case of the French connective cest pourquoi), a fact that
can be only be well captured by a scalar approach. From a cognitive perspective,
this classification, just like Sweetsers model, implies that various uses of connec-
tives require different abilities such as describing events, reasoning about events
or mental states and performing speech acts. The objective-subjective continuum
approach is however not used here because in this model, epistemic relations are
placed in the middle of the scale, between content and speech act relations. I will
argue on the contrary that content and speech act relations share some important
similarities, while epistemic relations require distinct cognitive abilities with re-
spect to the other two domains.
5.2 A cognitive analysis of domains of use
5.2.1 Domains of use and theory of mind
As argued in Chapter 4 in the discussion on modal verbs, the relationship between

the domains of use proposed by Sweetser and theory of mind abilities comes into
play for uses of connectives in the epistemic domain. Indeed, processing the use
of a connective in this domain requires the ability to understand that the speaker
is holding a belief, as a result of reasoning based on a premise presented as a plau-
sible cause. For example, in (9) below, the speaker entertains the belief that Max is
ill based on the evidence provided by his absence from work. Therefore, the truth
of the segment preceding the connective is presented with a weaker degree of
speaker endorsement in (9) compared with uses in the content domain such as in
(10). In other words, it merely contains a belief entertained by the speaker rather
than a fact presented as an ascertained truth. Indeed, when a causal connective is
used in the content domain, the fact presented in the consequence segment (be-
fore the connective), for example the fact that Max is ill, is quite certain and even
considered as already known by the addressee. The new information contained in
this sentence is the possible cause for his illness22 (the fact that he ate too much).
(10) Max is ill because he ate too much.
The meaning of (9) can be rephrased along the lines of (11) below. The belief com-
ponent is rendered explicit by embedding it into a complement clause.
(11) The speaker believes that Max is ill, because he didnt come to work today.
In consequence, in the epistemic domain, the segment preceding the connective

contains a metarepresentation of the speakers belief. Therefore, this observation
leads to the hypothesis that dealing with epistemic uses of connectives requires
the possession of theory of mind abilities while content uses do not, just as it is
the case for modal verbs.
In terms of the cognitive abilities they require, speech act uses are an inter-
mediate case between content and epistemic uses. Similarly to epistemic uses, the
explicit meaning conveyed by examples such as (12) requires the formation of a
metarepresentation, along the lines of (13).
22. In some other content uses, the second segment (the cause) can also be known by the
hearer. In that case, the new information conveyed by the utterance is simply the existence of a
causal relation between two known facts.
(12) Is Max coming? Because hes invited.

(13) The speaker asks if Max is coming because hes invited.
The main difference between the speech act and epistemic uses of connectives
lies in the semantic content of the metarepresentation. While the embedded
clause contains the speakers belief in the case of epistemic uses, it contains an
assertion, a question or a command in the case of speech act uses. These two
kinds of metarepresentations partly reflect the variety of humans metarepre-
sentational abilities, already alluded to in Chapter 1 and 2. In Sperbers (1997)
terminology, epistemic uses require metacognitive abilities (in other words a
theory of mind), while speech act uses require metacommunicative abilities.
From a cognitive point of view, the main difference between the two kinds of
metarepresentations is that the metarepresentation of an utterance does not re-
quire the possession of theory of mind abilities. Hence, if the comparison be-
tween content and epistemic uses of connectives is insightful, the comparison
between epistemic and speech act uses is also very revealing in disentangling
the role of metarepresentation in general versus theory of mind in particular for
the acquisition of connective uses.
In sum, this analysis shows that only a tripartite distinction such as the one
made by Sweetser can account for the differences between the possible uses of
connectives in terms of their requirements on theory of mind and metarepresen-
tational abilities. A binary distinction between semantic and pragmatic uses does
not provide a differentiated view of the kind of metarepresented content.
5.2.2 Domains of use and processing cost
For a model of connective use based on cognitive complexity, an important aspect

to be accounted for is the kind of pragmatic processes that are required to retrieve
the speakers meaning. I will argue in this section that these processes are different
for every domain of use. This analysis thus orders the domains into a hierarchy
from a pragmatic processing perspective, and brings additional evidence to the
thesis that the speech act and the epistemic domains should not be merged into a
single category. The notions and terminology I use in this section are taken from
relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986), but this choice of framework does
not constrain the generality of the reasoning involved, which can be easily trans-
ferred to other frameworks.
When a connective is used in the content domain, the causal meaning conveyed
can be retrieved at the level of the utterances basic explicature. In other words, this
meaning is part of the proposition expressed by the utterance, and can be retrieved
by enriching the logical form encoded by the utterance. The meaning conveyed by
the basic explicature is truth-conditional. In consequence, uses of connectives in

this domain also contribute to the truth conditions of the utterance.
In the speech act domain, the causal relation conveyed by the use of a con-
nective is found in a higher-level explicature, containing the metarepresenta-
tion of the speech act. In relevance theory, higher-level explicatures are also
part of the utterances explicit content but, unlike the basic explicature, they do
not contribute to its truth conditions. In this framework, the illocutionary force
of an utterance is always included in the higher-level explicatures. Moreover,
speech acts such as questions and orders only communicate higher-level expli-
catures rather than a single basic explicature (they are not truth-conditional).
In sum, the enrichment required to understand the use of a connective in the
content or the speech act domains is situated at the level of the content explicitly
communicated in the utterance. However, it is only in the speech act domain
that this enrichment requires the construction of a metarepresentation, in the
form of a higher-level explicature. Another difference between the two domains
is that the use of a connective in the content domain is truth-conditional, while
it is not in the speech act domain.
Uses of connectives in the epistemic domain require yet another kind of prag-
matic process. In the framework of relevance theory, information regarding the
speakers propositional attitude is one of the many higher-level explicatures of an
utterance. However, the metarepresentations conveyed by uses of connectives in
the epistemic domain cannot be treated as part of these higher-level explicatures,
for two reasons.
First, if the epistemic property of these uses of connectives were part of the
explicit content of an utterance, it would mean that the segment preceding the
connective would actually contain two different types of propositional content
depending on the domain of use. When used in the content domain, the segment
would contain a proposition p, and in the epistemic domain this segment would
contain another proposition that could be paraphrased as X believes that p. From
a semantic point of view, these two propositions cannot be equivalent. Moreover,
assigning epistemic content within explicit content is also problematic because it
seems difficult to explain why the segment preceding the connective would com-
municate a simple proposition p in some cases and an embedded proposition X
believes that p in others.
Second, when causal connectives are used in the epistemic domain, the typi-
cal consequence-CONNECTIVE-cause order conveyed by the same connectives in
the other two domains is systematically reversed. Two solutions can be found to
explain this observation. One possibility is to hypothesize that words like parce
que are polysemic and should be treated as two different connectives. This is the
solution implicitly chosen by Roulet et al. (1985) who describe parce que as an
o perator when it is used in the content domain and as a connective when it conveys
epistemic meaning. The second possibility, on the contrary, maintains that these
connectives always carry a causal consequence-cause meaning, even when they
are used in the epistemic domain. From that perspective, access to this meaning
should rely on pragmatic processes. The challenge for a pragmatic account con-
sists in explaining by which pragmatic principles the causal meaning conveyed by
uses of a connective in the epistemic domain can be retrieved. The solution pro-
posed here is that this process requires the hearer to access an implicated premise.
Consider Example (2), repeated here for convenience:
In this example, Maxs illness cannot semantically be a consequence of the fact

that he didnt come to work. In order to find the correct causal relation, the hearer
must access encyclopedic information about the fact that being ill is a typical
reason for not coming to work. With this information, he will be able to under-
stand the causal relation between the speakers conclusion (Max is ill), and the
reason why he drew that conclusion (Max didnt come to work). In this inter-
pretation, the typical consequence-cause order conveyed by causal connectives
is restored: the conclusion drawn by the speaker is presented before the premise
that caused the reasoning. Crucially, the construction of this causal relation can-
not be achieved simply by enriching the meaning explicitly communicated in the
utterance. It requires the derivation of an implicature. In virtue of the principle
of Modified Occams Razor defined by Grice, an explanation based on semantic
parsimony must be preferred. Therefore, I favor the explanation based on prag-
matic processes.
To summarize, the comprehension process involved in the use of a connective
in the content domain is limited to the retrieval of the utterances basic explica-
ture. In the domain of speech acts, this process applies at the level of higher-level
explicatures, and is related to the construction of a metarepresentation. In the
epistemic domain, this process requires the derivation of an implicature. These
processes all involve a different processing cost.
From a psycholinguistic perspective, several experiments tend to confirm
that processing implicatures is more costly than processing other kinds of en-
riched pragmatic meanings. For example, Gibbs and Moise (1997) and Recanati
(1993) separate two kinds of pragmatic information or knowledge, respectively
called primary and secondary. According to these authors, primary pragmatic
knowledge applies default background knowledge to provide an interpretation
of what the speaker says. This type of knowledge is deemed to be wildly shared
and therefore to be in many cases almost invisible for the speakers. On the other
hand, secondary pragmatic knowledge includes information from context in
order to provide an interpretation of what is implicated by an utterance. Gibbs

(2004) reports a series of experiments involving reading time where subjects
had to process either primary or secondary pragmatic meaning. All these ex-
periments led to the same conclusion, namely that drawing conversational
implicatures increased processing effort over that needed to understand what
speakers say (Gibbs 2004:66).
Coming back to the processing of domains of use, in view of this evidence,
I predict that, because of the inferential process involved, the epistemic domain
should be the most costly to access in terms of pragmatic processes. On the other
hand, the kind of pragmatic enrichment required to understand speech act uses
belongs to primary pragmatic processes, which are most of the time invisible.
Therefore, the difference between speech act and content uses of connectives has
probably no repercussion in terms of processing cost. In sum, the main expected
difference between domains of use in terms of processing cost is the one separat-
ing explicit (primary) and implicit (secondary) processing, in other words the
epistemic domain from the other two domains.
5.2.3 Previous empirical data on processing cost
A study by Traxler et al. (1997) has explicitly addressed the question of processing
cost in relation to sentences containing the connective because. The authors com-
pare the reading time of sentences containing uses of because in the content and
the epistemic domains called causal and diagnostic statements in their termi-
nology under four different experimental conditions. No comparison is made
however involving the possible speech act uses of this connective.
In order to ensure that subjects mentally accessed the correct relation (content
or epistemic), the two types of sentences in Traxler et al.s experiment contained
a reversed order of presentation between the same segments. For instance, (15)
below is a case of epistemic relation, whereas (16) is a case of content relation.
(15) There are moths in Marys cupboard because there are holes in her clothes.
(16) There are holes in Marys clothes because there are moths in her cupboard.
In (15), the order of presentation of the two segments, with the cause first and the
consequence second, is indeed reversed with respect to typical causal relations.
Therefore, an epistemic reading becomes the only possibility for this sentence,
while a causal reading is the most salient one for sentence (16). The experiment
simply measured the reading times for each sentence, and observations for this
pair of sentences indicated that epistemic relations took significantly longer to be
processed than causal relations.
The second experimental condition tested by Traxler et al. involved the same
sentences with the difference that the metarepresentation communicated by epis-
temic relations was rendered explicit. Hence, sentences (15) and (16) became (17)
and (18) respectively.
(17) I think that there are moths in Marys cupboard because there are holes in
her clothes.
(18) I think that there are holes in Marys clothes because there are moths in her
cupboard.
Crucial as this test may be for the comparison of processing cost between do-
mains of use, it is however problematic, because the epistemic component of the
clause preceding the connective does not have the same scope in the two cases.
This problem, which Traxler et al. failed to identify, has been discussed indepen-
dently by several other authors. The Lambda-l Group (1975) first pointed it out
in their analysis of the possible domains of use for French causal connectives.
Haegeman (2003) also presented a series of syntactic tests assessing scope effect,
with the conclusion that such pairs of sentences were not equivalent from a syn-
tactic perspective. The problem is the following. When the connective is used in
the content domain as in (18), the information I think that applies to the whole
sentence whereas in the epistemic domain, as in (17), it applies only to the seg-
ment preceding the connective. This difference is made explicit in (19) for the
epistemic domain and (20) for the content domain.
(19) (The reason why) [I think that [there are moths in Marys cupboard]] is
because there are holes in her clothes.
(20) [I think that [(the reason why) there are holes in Marys clothes is because
there are moths in her cupboard]].
In this second experiment, the reading times measured with this pair of sentences
decreased for epistemic relations while it increased for content relations. There-
fore explicitly presenting the metarepresentation contained in the epistemic rela-
tion seems to increase processing speed while adding this component to a content
relation impairs processing. However, this measure could be potentially biased
because of the difference of scope effect described above.
A third experiment by Traxler et al. aimed at measuring reading time when
the two kinds of sentences were introduced by a modal marker like perhaps, as in
(21) and (22) below:
(21) Perhaps there are moths in Marys cupboard because there are holes in her
clothes.
(22) Perhaps there are holes in Marys clothes because there are moths in her
cupboard.
The reading times measured under these conditions indicate that the addition
of a modal marker improves the reading time of epistemic sentences but doesnt
impair that of causal sentences.
In a final experiment, Traxler et al. measured the reading time of the two
types of sentences by adding an embedding similar to that of sentences in the
second condition (Examples 17 and 18). The difference between the two tests is
that this time, the main verb chosen (forget) did not correspond to the implicit
metarepresentation contained in epistemic sentences (best paraphrased by think).
In this case, the reading time is longer for both kinds of sentences.
(23) John forgot that there were moths in Marys cupboard because there were
holes in her clothes.
(24) John forgot that there are holes in Marys clothes because there were moths
in her cupboard.
In addition to these four experimental conditions, Traxler et al. (1997) have as-
sessed the plausibility of the various kinds of relations used in their experiments,
by asking human judges if a given cause X was a good reason for Y. For example, if
the fact that there are holes in ones clothes is a good reason to think that there are
moths in the closet. The assessment provided by these human judges indicated that
the fact of making the metarepresentation contained in epistemic relations explicit
improved the plausibility of the relation for these sentences compared to that of
content relations. On the other hand, embedding the segment preceding the con-
nective under a main verb which didnt make sense (such as forget) results in worse
acceptability judgments for both sentences. As far as the addition of a modal marker
is concerned, judgments were equivalent for the two kinds of sentences. Unfortu-
nately, the authors didnt test the plausibility of causal and epistemic sentences when
no modification was added, as in Examples (15) and (16) above.
The results of this experimental study are all compatible with the proposal
defended in this chapter. First, the fact that epistemic relations take longer than
causal relations to process is expected since they were shown to be cognitive-
ly more complex. The improvement of the reading time for epistemic relations
found in the second experiment, when the metarepresentation was made explicit,
is also to be expected. The proposal put forward here is that epistemic relations
contain an implicit metarepresentation that has to be recovered by an implicature.
It is therefore logical that making this information explicit should improve the
processing of such sentences. On the other hand, since relations in the content
domain do not contain an implicit metarepresentation, it is also expected that
the additional syntactic processing should slow down the processing of these sen-
tences. However, as mentioned above, this difference could also be attributable to
a difference of scope effect.
The results found in the third experiment are again compatible with my pro-
posal. The explicit mention of a modal marker probably encourages subjects to
place themselves in the domain of mental states. It is therefore to be expected that
this indication should improve the reading time of epistemic relations. However,
unlike in the second experiment, this modification does not add a layer of syn-
tactic complexity to the sentence. It is therefore also to be expected that the pro-
cessing of content relations should not be impaired, as was the case in the second
experiment.
Lastly, the fact that reading times were impaired in the fourth experiment,
when the clause preceding the connective was embedded under a main verb that
didnt make sense, is also largely to be expected. This modification adds a level of
complexity to the sentence without providing additional semantic information.
This result confirms that it is only making the correct metarepresentation explicit
that improves the reading time for epistemic sentences.
In sum, results from Traxler et al.s study, as summarized in some detail here,
provide significant support to my hypothesis that epistemic relations are more
difficult to process than causal relations because they contain the metarepresenta-
tion of the speakers mental state.
5.3 Hypotheses regarding the acquisition of domains of use
According to the cognitive model put forward in this chapter, all three domains
of use for discourse connectives require a different kind of pragmatic treatment.
These differences have direct consequences for the acquisition process of these
lexical items. The general hypothesis that I will submit and justify is that it is the
factor of cognitive complexity rather than other factors such as parental input that
determines the order of acquisition between domains. In this section, my aim is to
spell out the developmental hypotheses following from my analysis of domains of
use and show that they are supported by existing data in the literature. I will assess
this theoretical proposal empirically in the following chapter.
One of the hypotheses I have proposed is that propositional relations me-
diated by a connective are not equivalent from a cognitive point of view in the
epistemic and the speech act domains, as in the former they rely on the ability to
reason about mental states. Therefore, using connectives in the epistemic domain
requires the possession of theory of mind abilities. In the speech act domain, the
metarepresentational abilities involved are of a different kind and involve the
ability to reason about utterances, not mental states. Moreover, understanding an
epistemic use of connectives requires the ability to draw an implicature, whereas
the recovery of the metarepresentation conveyed in speech act uses is done by
e nrichment of the explicit content of the utterance. For these two reasons, epis-
temic relations can be hypothesized to be more complex that speech act relations
from a cognitive point of view, as several empirical studies with normally devel-
oping and autistic children tend to indicate.
Existing data in the developmental literature tend to indicate that the abil-
ity to reason about utterances is acquired earlier than the ability to reason about
mental states. De Villiers and Pyers (2002) note for instance that normally devel-
oping children acquire communication verbs like say or ask earlier than mental
state verbs like think or believe, even though both require the same kind of syn-
tactic structures (tensed complement clauses). De Villiers and Pyers explain this
difference by the fact that the locutionary and illocutionary acts performed by
communication verbs are directly observable whereas those referred to by mental
state verbs are not. Whether or not this interpretation is justified, this result in any
case provides some confirmation that the ability to reason about mental states is
acquired later than the ability to reason about utterances.
Baron-Cohen (1997) assessed the ability of autistic children to understand
metarepresentations of thoughts and utterances, using a false naming paradigm.
In this paradigm, the experimenter gives an erroneous name to an object placed
in front of the child and that is familiar to him. Then the child is asked why the
experimenter said that. In order to answer this question correctly, the child must
be able to reason about the experimenters mental states (for example the experi-
menter was mistaken, he was joking, etc.). Baron-Cohen also asked his subjects
to answer questions about the content of utterances, such as Did the experi-
menter say that it was an X? In some cases, the name chosen was correct while
in others it was not. This second type of question was meant to assess the autis-
tic childrens ability to evaluate the truth of an assertion embedded in reported
speech. Results indicated that autistic children systematically fail to answer ques-
tions targeting mental states but are perfectly able to answer questions targeting
utterances. Baron-Cohen also notes that normally developing children are able
to answer both kinds of questions by the age of two years and nine months. The
difference between the two groups was not due to a difference in general intel-
ligence, since a group of children with moderate learning difficulties was able
to answer both kinds of questions. Moreover, the autistic subjects tested in this
experiment had a verbal age of about six years, which also excludes the possibil-
ity that their failure could be due to a language delay. In sum, by demonstrating
that some subjects are specifically impaired in this respect, this experiment tends
to indicate that metacognitive and metacommunicative abilities rely on different
cognitive processes. Moreover, it confirms that only metacognitive abilities are
related to theory of mind, at least in the sense that the autistic children do not
have them.
As argued in Section 5.2.2, experiments on pragmatic processing with adults

indicate that the derivation of implicatures requires a higher processing cost than
the derivation of explicatures. This phenomenon is even more noticeable during
the acquisition period, as was for example observed by Noveck et al. (2001) in
the acquisition of metaphors. In their experiment, the additional cost involved in
metaphor processing was apparent with children but disappeared completely with
adults23. It seems therefore reasonable to assume that the need to build a meta-
representation by implicature in order to understand connectives in the epistemic
domain adds an additional processing cost that could possibly delay the acquisi-
tion of this domain of use. The study by Traxler et al. (1997) discussed above also
indicated that epistemic uses were more costly to process than content uses.
In summary, the data reviewed above indicates that speech act uses of con-
nectives are probably acquired before epistemic uses. Content uses should in
theory be the easiest to process, since they do not require the formation of a
metarepresentation. From a developmental point of view, the question is how the
processing cost, that was predicted to be invisible for adults, could be reflected
in the order of acquisition. The answer to this question might also depend on
the age of acquisition of the cognitive abilities that are necessary to use a given
lexical item. In the case of domains of use, the main hypothesis proposed here is
that epistemic uses require theory of mind abilities. These abilities become fully
developed in the course of childrens fourth year of life. On the other hand, most
children start to use several connectives much earlier, during the second half of
their third year (see for example Bloom et al. 1980). As a consequence, it is to
be expected that epistemic uses should be delayed compared to the other uses
because children do not yet have the required cognitive abilities when they start
to produce connectives.
As far as speech act uses are concerned, even though they require the con-
struction of a metarepresentation, it is not necessarily the case that this constraint
should delay the beginning of production compared to content uses. The con-
struction of metarepresentations relies on a general mechanism of embedding. In
syntax, this mechanism is used to express several forms of complex clauses like
complement clauses and relative clauses. The correlation between the acquisition
23. The fact that the processing cost of metaphors is invisible for adults is compatible with the
distinction between primary and secondary pragmatic processes presented in Section 5.2.2.
In recent studies, for example Carston (2002), metaphors belong to the category of meaning
explicitly expressed in an utterance (i.e. primary pragmatic processes). These processes have
been found to involve no extra processing cost for adults (Gibbs 2004). Moreover, many other
studies on metaphors, reviewed by Glucksberg (2001), confirm that no extra processing cost is
involved with respect to literal statements.
of these syntactic constructions and metarepresentational abilities has been docu-

mented in the literature24 (see Chapter 4). In the process of acquiring their moth-
er tongue, children start to produce complex clauses shortly after their second
birthday (Diessel 2004:10). In other words, when they start producing their first
connectives, children have already acquired the embedding process necessary to
form metarepresentations. As a consequence, it is probable that the necessity to
construct a metarepresentation is not the relevant criterion to explain a possible
difference in the order of acquisition between domains. The relevant criteria are
the kind of metarepresented content (thoughts or utterances) and the kind of
pragmatic process involved (explicit or implicit enrichment) that sets the epis-
temic domain apart from the other two domains.
5.4 The domains of use of French causal connectives
In French, three connectives can be used to convey a causal relation: car, parce que
and puisque. The connective parce que is the closest equivalent of the English be-
cause, and car bears some resemblance with the English for. As for puisque, it can
often (but not always) be translated by since in English. These connectives share
the important property of presenting the causal relation with the consequence
before the connective and the cause following it. Other French connectives such
as donc and alors have the reverse order of presentation (cause-CONNECTIVE-
consequence) and are usually considered to be inferential rather than causal in
nature (Moeschler 2006). The difference between the three causal connectives
studied here can partially be accounted for by the different domains in which
they can be used.
The most detailed analysis of the three French connectives car, parce que and
puisque has been conducted by the Lambda-l Group (1975). These authors made
a thorough comparison of the syntactic and semantic properties of these three
connectives, with the main conclusion that car and puisque share a number of
important features and are rather distinct from parce que. This, the authors argue,
is a surprising result, because in traditional grammar textbooks, parce que and
puisque, two subordinating conjunctions, were always considered to be very simi-
lar and opposed to car, a coordinating conjunction.
24. This does not mean however that the cognitive ability to form metarepresentations is re-
ducible to the syntactic phenomenon of recursion. This ability also requires the correct ma-
nipulation of concepts in the domain of communication or of mental states.
The main distinctive feature of parce que in the Lambda-l Groups analysis
is that it is the only French causal connective to be used in the content domain.
These authors note however that parce que also has additional uses in the speech
act domain (epistemic uses arent treated as a separate category), and that these
uses are very frequent in speech. In their analysis, car and puisque are on the other
hand limited to the speech act domain. The difference between these two connec-
tives is therefore not a matter of domains but results from the different communi-
cative intentions of the speaker. While car is used to justify a speech act, puisque
is used to persuade the listener, by obliging him to recognize the causal relation
existing between the two segments.
In later work, Roulet et al. (1985) have argued that parce que, car and puisque
could all be used to relate segments in the content domain. In the speech act do-
main, they note that the use of parce que is marginal, unlike car and puisque, which
are very commonly used. In their classification, only puisque can be used in what
they call the enunciation level. Moeschler (1989) has however argued that some
uses of parce que could also be found in the enunciation domain, as in (25) below.
(25) Il y a du poulet dans le frigo, parce que je nai pas envie de faire manger.
There is some chicken in the fridge, CONNECTIVE I dont feel like cooking.
I tend to agree with Roulet et al.s conclusion that parce que cannot be used in such
cases because the examples provided by Moeschler seem to me quite controversial in
terms of acceptability, though this could be assessed empirically too. However, even
if these examples were rated by speakers as acceptable, they would not need to be
part of a specific category, and could simply be treated as speech acts of assertion.
In general, these studies do not provide a fully coherent picture of the possible
domains of use for the three French causal connectives. Notably, the possibility
of using parce que outside the content domain is a matter of controversy. One
possible cause for these differences, which is worth investigating, is that these
studies are solely based on a handful of made-up examples and do not rely on
independent empirical observations. I have proposed elsewhere (Zufferey 2007,
to appear) an in-depth analysis of the uses of these connectives from an empirical
perspective, using corpus data and elicitation tasks. The main empirical findings
resulting from these studies are the following.
In written French, parce que is mostly used in the content domain while car
is mostly used in the speech act and epistemic domains: these two connectives
are therefore in a complementary distribution. However, in spoken French, parce
que is used with similar frequency in every domain and has entirely replaced car,
which does not seem to be used at all anymore. As far as puisque is concerned,
its uses are indeed limited to the speech act and the epistemic domains. However,
they are never interchangeable with the other two connectives when they are used
in the same domains, because puisque conveys a different, more precise meaning.
I will argue in the next section that all uses of puisque can be accounted for using
the notion of echoic language use, as defined by Sperber and Wilson (1986).
From the perspective of the relations between connectives and theory of
mind abilities, the main conclusions to be drawn from this section are the fol-
lowing. First, parce que is the best-suited French connective to study in relation to
the acquisition of the various domains of use. Evidence from empirical data tends
to indicate that this connective is used with a similar frequency in all three do-
mains of use in speech. Therefore, the quantity of input that children get for this
connective is important and evenly distributed between domains. Parce que will
therefore be the connective used for the empirical investigation of the order of
acquisition between domains of use in Chapter 6. Second, car cannot be an object
of study for (early) acquisition studies because of its absence in oral input. Lastly,
because of its intrinsic echoic meaning, puisque is likely to require more complex
cognitive abilities than the other two. The remainder of this chapter is dedicated
to analyze the meaning of puisque, with the objective of demonstrating why uses
of this connective require theory of mind abilities.
5.5 The procedural meaning of puisque
5.5.1 Previous analyses of puisque
According to the Lambda-l Group (1975), the peculiarity of puisque consists

in enabling the speaker to oblige the hearer to admit the speech act or belief
uttered in the segment preceding it. It is notably in that respect that puisque dif-
fers from car, the latter serving only to justify a speech act, without forcing the
hearer to admit it25.
(26) Max est chez lui, puisque sa voiture est gare devant la porte.
Max is at home, CONNECTIVE his car is parked in front of the door.
In this example, the speaker presents the cause justifying his conclusion that Max
is at home as an indisputable premise (the car is parked in front of the door). As a
consequence, the conclusion is presented as obvious and indisputable as well and
the hearer is forced to accept it.
25. The Lambda-L group only opposes puisque to car because according to their analysis parce
que is mostly used in the content domain. However, given the analysis presented above, the
oppositions presented in this section carry over to parce que, given that this connective can be
used in all three domains.
Another peculiarity of puisque with respect to car comes from the fact that
the speaker does not necessarily have to endorse the truth of the cause (pre-
sented in the segment following the connective). The idea is that the speaker
pretends that the hearer has already admitted (implicitly or explicitly) the truth
of the cause in order to force him to admit the consequence presented before
the connective. This use of puisque is illustrated in (27) below. In this example,
the speaker acts as if the hearer had stated the clause following it (I know every-
thing) and draws the consequence presented before the connective, here merely
in order emphasize how absurd this statement is. In such cases, puisque conveys
an ironic meaning.
(27) Donne-moi la rponse, puisque tu sais tout.
Give me the answer, CONNECTIVE you know everything.
The Lambda-l Group emphasizes yet another difference between car and puisque.
In some of its uses, puisque does not require that the hearer admits the cause seg-
ment. Its truth is presented as obvious from the immediate context of speech, as
in (28) below.
(28) Nous nous sommes tromps de rue, puisquil ny a pas de numro 47 ici.
We are in the wrong street, CONNECTIVE there is no number 47 here.
In this case, the fact that there is no number 47 in the street should be obvious
in context. According to the Lambda-l Group, the obvious character of the cause
makes the use of puisque possible and its replacement by car, although grammati-
cal, would lead to a change of meaning.
(29) Nous nous sommes tromps de rue, car il ny a pas de numro 47 ici.
In (29), the reading obtained is that the speaker is actually informing the hearer
of a fact he did not know or would not be immediately obvious to him. For this
reason, when the hearer cannot ignore the fact presented as a cause in a given
situation, the use of car provides unacceptable results, as illustrated in (30) below.
In this example, the speaker cannot possibly ignore the fact that he is here. Such a
sentence becomes acceptable when connected by puisque, as in (31).
(30) *Aide-moi monter ces paquets, car tu es l.
Help me carry these bags, CONNECTIVE you are here.
(31) Aide-moi monter ces paquets, puisque tu es l.
Later on, Ducrot26 (1983) refined this analysis of puisque, giving up the idea
that the cause segment had to be admitted by the hearer at the time of speaking.
26. Oswald Ducrot is a former member of the Lambda-l Group.

ucrot motivated this change by a series of counterexamples found in literary

D
and journalistic texts. In these examples, Ducrot argues, it is impossible to state
that the hearer already knew the cause when the utterance was produced. One
such example is taken from a literary text by the 17th Century French dramatist
Molire (32), called Les fcheux. In the context of this play, it is clear that the ad-
dressee does not know the reason for coming announced by the speaker.
(32) Pour moi, je ne crains pas que je vous importune, puisque je viens,
Monsieur, faire votre fortune.
For me, I do not fear to bother you, CONNECTIVE I am coming, Sir, to make
you rich.
Ducrot also notices another fact that is incompatible with the Lambda-l Groups
analysis. In some cases, the use of puisque does not force the hearer to admit the
cause following the connective, but this obligation seems to apply to the speaker
himself, as in (33) below. According to Ducrot, in such cases the speaker appears
to be yielding to an external obligation (1983:170, my translation), rather than
trying to force the hearer to admit its content.
(33) Allons travailler, puisquil le faut.
Lets go to work, CONNECTIVE we have to.
These counterexamples have led Ducrot to propose a new analysis of puisque, us-
ing tools from argumentation theory (Anscombre and Ducrot 1983). This analy-
sis consists mostly in separating the notions of speech act and enunciation as well
as the related ones of speaker and enunciator. The details of this analysis are not
relevant for my purposes here, but the facts observed by Ducrot will be dealt with
within the framework of relevance theory, providing a unified analysis of all uses
of this connective from a cognitive perspective.
5.5.2 Puisque as a marker of echoic use of language
Ducrot (1983:179) observes that a fundamental difference between car and

puisque is that only puisque can be used to echo a previous utterance, as in (34)
below. However, if the speaker explicitly endorses the truth of the cause, the use
of car (or parce que according to the analysis defended here) becomes possible, as
illustrated in (35) by the addition of indeed (effectivement).
(34) Jean: Il fait beau.
Pierre: Allons la plage, puisquil fait beau.
Jean: The weather is nice.
Pierre: lets go to the beach CONNECTIVE the weather is nice.
(35) Jean: Il fait beau.

Pierre: Allons la plage, car / parce quil fait effectivement beau.
Pierre: lets go to the beach, CONNECTIVE the weather is indeed nice.
Ducrot did not extend the analysis of puisque as an echoic marker to other uses
of this connective, probably because his definition of echo is limited to cases
where the quotation applies to an utterance immediately preceding the use of
puisque. However, if the notion of echo is applied in a boarder sense, as defined
by relevance theory (1986), then I will show that all uses of this connective can
be accounted for in a unified way. In relevance theory, the notion of echoic use of
language covers all cases of interpretive use where the speaker wants to convey his
own attitude towards the echoed content (1986:2389). Following this definition,
the source of the echo need not be restricted to a specific speaker but can also be
a group of speakers or even common knowledge.
I submit that all uses of puisque involve a form of echoic use of language, in
which the speaker wishes to communicate a certain attitude towards the echoed
content. In Example (33) repeated below in (36), the source of echo is simply a
belief shared by the community (it is necessary to work). In (37) below, the source
of echo is a group of speakers, who share the belief that walking under a ladder
brings bad luck. In addition, the notion of echo also includes cases where the
speaker refers to his own utterance or thought, as in (38). In this case, the use
of puisque is possible only if the speaker had already mentioned his going to the
theater. If this information were unknown to the hearer, the correct connective
would be car or parce que.
(36) Allons travailler, puisquil le faut.
Lets go to work, CONNECTIVE we have to.
(37) Fais attention o tu marches, puisque passer sous une chelle porte malheur.
Be careful where you walk, CONNECTIVE walking under a ladder brings
bad luck.
(38) a. Jean: Tu as vu le film dhier soir?
b. Pierre: Non, puisque jtais au thtre.
Jean: Did you see the movie last night?
Pierre: No, CONNECTIVE I went to the theater.
As mentioned above, puisque is not the only connective that can be used to convey
echoic meaning. The other French causal connectives parce que and car can also
be echoic, when the speaker explicitly endorses the source of echo. Therefore, the
peculiarity of puisque lies in the kind of attitude conveyed by the meaning echoed
in the cause segment. Two different uses of this connective can be distinguished
in that respect. In some cases, the speaker uses puisque to communicate what
Sperber and Wilson call a tacitly dissociative attitude, in other words an attitude
of implicit criticism, giving rise to an ironic meaning, as in (27) above, repeated

below in (39). The fact that such uses of the connective yields an ironic effect is
compatible with relevance theorys definition of irony as a way to express the
speakers dissociative attitude to a tacitly attributed utterance or thought (Wilson
2006:1724).
In other cases, the speaker does not use puisque to convey disagreement but
distances himself from the entity presented as the source of the cause segment in
order to indicate a specific degree of endorsement. Sometimes this distance en-
ables the speaker to rely on an external authority, and therefore to make the causal
relation appear indisputable27, as in (40) below. In other cases still, puisque is used
as a hearsay marker, and the speaker conveys a lesser degree of certainty, by indi-
cating that the information was obtained through an external and not necessarily
reliable source, as in (41).
Give me the answer, CONNECTIVE you know everything.
(40) Lautisme nest pas une psychose, puisque LOMC le dfinit comme un
trouble neurodveloppemental.
Autism is not a psychosis, CONNECTIVE the WHO defines it as a
neurodevelopmental disorder.
(41) On a le temps, puisque ce monsieur affirme que le trajet ne prend que
20minutes.
We have enough time, CONNECTIVE this sir says the road only takes
20minutes.
In short, the special nature of puisque does not lie in the fact that the hearer has
to be aware of the cause, as the Lambda-l Group had stated. As argued here, the
universal constraint placed by puisque on the cause segment is that it must con-
tain a form of echo, towards which the speaker takes a certain attitude, in order
to achieve various communicative goals such as irony or persuasion. The notion
of echo thus defined accounts for all uses of puisque previously discussed in the
literature as well as those identified empirically by Zufferey (2007, to appear).
5.5.3 Puisque and theory of mind abilities
The analysis of puisque presented above indicated that this connective can only
be used in the epistemic and speech act domains. Therefore, puisque necessarily
requires theory of mind abilities when used in the epistemic domain, just as it is
27. Ducrot had already discussed the possibility of using an external source of authority, but his
analysis focused on evidential markers only, such as il parat que in French (1984:Chapter 7).
the case for other connectives discussed above like parce que. However, contrary
to parce que, puisque bears a more intrinsic relation to theory of mind abilities
because of the meaning conveyed in the cause segment of the relation (after the
connective).
Because of its echoic nature, the cause segment of the relation conveyed by
puisque contains a metarepresented thought (a thought about another thought).
Therefore, contrary to clauses related by car or parce que, both segments always
contain a metarepresentation. Moreover, the metarepresentation contained in the
cause segment is not a first-order but a second-order one. By way of example, the
double embedding of Example (39), repeated below as (42) for convenience is
made explicit in (43).
Give me the answer CONNECTIVE you know everything.
(43) [Le locuteur demande lauditeur de lui donner la rponse] puisque [le locu-
teur pense que [lauditeur a tort de croire que] lauditeur sait tout]].
[The speaker asks the hearer to give him the answer] CONNECTIVE [the
speaker believes that [the hearer is wrong to believe that] the hearer knows
everything]].
The second-order metarepresentation contained in the cause segment is a fun-

damental difference between puisque and the other two connectives presented
above, since in the case of car and parce que, the cause segment does not contain a
metarepresentation at all. This peculiarity of puisque has important consequences
from the point of view of the cognitive processing it requires, which takes a differ-
ent form depending of the various uses of this connective.
It was argued in Chapter 2 (Section 2.3.1) that the processing of ironic utter-
ances required advanced (second-order) theory of mind abilities. It seems there-
fore reasonable to submit that ironic uses of the connective such as (42) above
also require advanced theory of mind abilities. The question is whether all uses of
the connective or only ironic ones require such advanced abilities. The answer to
that question depends on the reason why irony requires advanced theory of mind
abilities in the first place. If the important property of irony from the point of view
of mindreading skills is the presence of an echoic meaning, then not only all uses
of puisque should require advanced theory of mind abilities but also some uses of
parce que and car, when they convey a form of echo as in (35) above.
Wilson (forthcoming) proposes an alternative explanation for the relation
between irony and advanced theory of mind abilities. According to Wilson, the
reason why irony requires such abilities is not its echoic property but more spe-
cifically the fact that the attitude conveyed by the speaker of ironic utterances is
always tacitly dissociative. Therefore, what matters for the correlation between
irony and second-order theory of mind abilities is the kind of attitude conveyed,
rather than the double embedding of representations required. The logic behind
this explanation is that passing second-order false belief tests does not only re-
quire the ability to form thoughts about thoughts, but also the ability to assess
the truth or falsity of these thoughts about thoughts (this ability is called meta-
logical by Mascaro and Sperber 2009, see Chapter 2, Section 2.2.3). In conse-
quence, Wilson argues that the delay in passing standard second-order false
belief tests [with respect to first-order ones] is not so much [due to] the extra
layer of mindreading involved as the extra complexity of assessing the truth or
falsity of thoughts about thoughts.
Even though it lacks empirical validation at the moment, this proposal seems
preferable to the first one, because it leads to a narrower connection between irony
and advanced theory of mind skills. Following the definition given in relevance
theory, the notion of echo encompasses a large number of language uses going
from mere repetition to requests for confirmation, and it seems rather unlikely
that all of them should await the development of advanced theory of mind skills
to be mastered.
The various uses of puisque provide an ideal testbed for these hypotheses.
From a developmental perspective, if the important property for the observed
correlation is the presence of echoic information, then no use of the connective
puisque should be found before children are able to pass advanced mindreading
tests. If on the other hand only ironic uses require such abilities, the acquisition
of this connective should be divided in several phases, with the uses that convey
a degree of endorsement being acquired earlier than ironic uses. These questions
will be studied from an empirical perspective in Chapter 7.
Lastly, it follows from this analysis that all uses of puisque require at least first-
order theory of mind abilities. However, it is to be expected that puisque should
be acquired later than parce que, even when the latter is used in the epistemic
domain. This difference is due to the fact that the use of puisque requires the con-
struction of two metarepresented contents one in the segment before and the
other in the segment after the connective whereas only the segment preceding
the connective contains a metarepresentation in the case of parce que or car.
5.6 Summary
In this chapter, I have discussed the notion of domains of use and argued that a
tripartite distinction as spelled out in the work of Sweetser was the best-suited one
to account for the cognitive difference in each domain of use. In addition to show-
ing the role of theory of mind abilities for uses of connectives in the epistemic
omain, I have proposed an innovative account of the cognitive complexity re-

d
lated to every domain of use, based on the three following criteria.
The first distinctive criterion is related to the presence of a metarepresenta-
tion in one of the segments. This criterion distinguishes the content domain on
one hand from the speech act and epistemic domains on the other. The second
criterion is linked to the kind of metarepresented content and separates the epis-
temic from the speech act domain. The third criterion is the kind of pragmatic
process that is required to access the speakers meaning. This process is different
for all three domains but mostly separates the epistemic domain, which requires
enrichment at the implicit level, from the other two domains that are obtained by
enrichment of the explicit content of the utterance.
From a developmental point of view, the main conclusion reached in this
analysis is that epistemic uses of connectives should be acquired later than the
other two domains, for two reasons. First, they are the only domain requiring
theory of mind abilities. Children should therefore not be able to use them be-
fore developing full-fledged mindreading skills in the course of their fourth year.
Second, these uses require an enrichment of the utterance meaning at the implicit
level, and this requirement is very likely to delay the first epistemic uses of con-
nectives with respect to the other two domains.
I then discussed the possible uses of French causal connectives in the three
domains of use in order to justify the choice of parce que, as the best-suited con-
nective to study in relation to the acquisition of domains of use. The reason for
this choice is that parce que is evenly distributed between domains in standard
spoken French and it is very frequently used. The acquisition of domains of use
will be studied empirically in Chapter 6.
In the last section, I argued that the connective puisque is intrinsically related
to the possession of theory of mind abilities because of the echoic meaning con-
veyed in the cause segment of the relation. The acquisition of puisque in compari-
son to the development of first and second-order theory of mind abilities will be
discussed in Chapter 7.
chapter 6
Empirical study on the acquisition

of the French connective parce que
This chapter is dedicated to an empirical validation of the hypotheses pre-

sented in Chapter 5, concerning the acquisition of domains of use for connec-
tives. These hypotheses can be summarized as follows. At a theoretical level,
the order of acquisition between domains can be explained by a difference in
their cognitive complexity rather than their frequency in the input. Two of the
factors identified to account for cognitive complexity were deemed relevant to
explain the order of acquisition between domains: the relationship to theory
of mind abilities and the kind of pragmatic process involved, explicature or
implicature. More specifically, it was argued that only epistemic uses of con-
nectives required theory of mind abilities, because they involved the metarep-
resentation of thoughts. In addition, in this analysis, epistemic uses were also
the only ones requiring the derivation of an implicature. These two factors
single out the epistemic domain as the most complex of the three and it is
therefore expected that this domain should be acquired by children later than
the two others. Moreover, the relationship between epistemic uses and theory
of mind abilities should be apparent due to a rather similar age of acquisition
between the two abilities.
The French connective parce que was chosen in order to study the order of
acquisition between domains of use because it has a high frequency and is even-
ly distributed between domains in speech, as argued in Chapter 5. This chapter
opens with a review of previous empirical studies focusing on the acquisition of
domains of use (6.1) and continues with the presentation of a longitudinal corpus
study on the acquisition of parce que (6.2). Results from this study are discussed
in relation to the theoretical hypotheses summarized above (6.3). The chapter
ends with a note on the use of parce que by autistic subjects (6.4).
6.1 The acquisition of domains of use
The acquisition of discourse connectives is a well-documented topic (see for ex-

ample Bloom et al. 1980; Braunwald 1985; Kail and Weissenborn 1984). However,
among all these studies, only three have explicitly addressed the question of the
acquisition of the domains in which connectives can be used. I will review these
studies in this section, with the conclusion that they do not provide a coherent
picture of the acquisition of domains of use, mainly due to some important meth-
odological differences between them.
6.1.1 Kyratzis, Guo and Ervin-Tripp
Chronologically, the first study to address the question of the order of acquisition
between domains of use was conducted by Kyratzis et al. (1990) with English-
speaking children. This study focused on two connectives, because and so, studied
in natural production. The corpus used was the Ervin-Tripp Family Corpus col-
lected at the University of Berkeley. This corpus contains recordings from seven
different families, with two or three children each, of an age ranging from 2;7 (i.e.
two years and seven months) to 11;1. All the recording sessions took place in the
childrens home during structured activities such as a meal but also during activi-
ties involving pretend play such as playing at tea parties. During the sessions, the
children were interacting with their mothers, their fathers and other children. In
total, the corpus contains data from 21 children.
The authors have extracted all occurrences of because and so produced by
the children, when these elements were used to mark a causal relation between
two clauses, in other words when an utterance or succession of utterances [ex-
pressed] a causal relation between events or between an event and a speech act
(1990:207208). The corpus contained a total of 303 causal relations thus defined.
The authors have also classified each occurrence into a domain of use, according
to the following criteria. If the connective marked a relation between two events,
the occurrence was classified as a content relation. If it served to justify a speech
act, it was classified as a speech act relation. If it served to justify a conclusion, it
was classified as an epistemic relation. In the epistemic and content domains, the
segment preceding the connective was always an assertion, whereas in the speech
act domain it could either be: a direct imperative as in (1), an indirect imperative
as in (2), or a question followed by a yes/no answer as in (3). The examples below
come from the Ervin-Tripp Family Corpus.
(1) Take the gloves off. Because they are dirty.
(2) You have to hold onto him because you dont want him to fall.
(3) Child 1: Why dont you call? Child 2: No, because the phones busy.
Chapter 6. Empirical study on the acquisition of the French connective parce que 125
In the analysis of their data, Kyratzis et al. have divided the children into three age
groups28: children from 2;4 to 3;6, children from 3;7 to 6;6 and children from 6;7
to 12;0. The results of this study are reproduced in Table 1 below.
Table 1. Percentage of occurrences per domains of use in Kyratzis et al. (1990: 209)
Age group Content Speech act Epistemic Incomplete Total
2;43;6 0 22.2 0 77.8 100 (18)
3;76;6 15.2 55.8 4.6 24.4 100 (197)
6;712;0 23.9 59.7 1.5 14.9 100 (67)
On the basis of their data, Kyratzis et al. conclude that the speech act domain
is the first to be acquired by children. Indeed, these relations are the only ones
produced by children of the first age group (between 2;4 and 3;6). Moreover,
they are also the most frequent ones in the three age groups. Relations in the
other two domains are already observed in the second age group, ranging from
3;7 to 6;6. Therefore, no sequence of acquisition between these two domains
can be inferred from this data. Kyratzis et al. use the criterion of frequency to
conclude that relations in the content domain are easier for children than rela-
tions in the epistemic domain. These authors also state that, contrary to the
content domain, relations in the epistemic domain are infrequent, even in the
third age group.
Kyratzis et al. interpret their results from a socio-pragmatic perspective.
According to these authors, relations in the speech act domain are the first to
be produced because they are the most useful, since they enable children to get
what they want. However, Kyratzis et al. also discuss an alternative interpreta-
tion, related to the quantity of input. A preliminary study on the kinds of rela-
tions produced by the parents in the same corpus tends to indicate that relations
in the speech act domain are also the most frequent in the input received by the
children29.
In sum, this study provides a first data set regarding the order of acquisi-
tion between domains of use. However, it does not precisely solve the question
of the age of acquisition of these domains, because the children were grouped
into large age ranges. Moreover, the order of acquisition cannot be inferred
for each individual child, because the corpus does not contain individual lon-
gitudinal data.
28. The authors provide no explicit justification for their division into these age groups.
29. Kyratzis et al. do not provide additional information regarding this data.
6.1.2 Spooren and Sanders
A second corpus study comes from the work of Spooren and Sanders (2008) with
Dutch-speaking children. Contrary to Kyratzis et al., these authors have not stud-
ied the acquisition of specific connectives but have coded all the coherence rela-
tions produced by the children. This study includes children from two age groups
of a mean age of 7;2 years and 12;1 years respectively.
One of the main hypotheses underlying this study is that the context of inter-
action has a great influence on the number of relations produced in each domain
of use (see also Sanders 1997). Following this hypothesis, a narration contains
mostly content relations while an argumentative dialogue contains mostly speech
act and epistemic relations. The authors have therefore created a corpus enabling
them to control this variable, using two elicitation tasks: the first one biased to-
wards the production of semantic relations (the content domain) and the second
one biased towards the production of pragmatic relations (the speech act and
epistemic domains). The first task consisted in describing a picture representing
a series of events, while the second one consisted in a conversation in which chil-
dren were encouraged to give their opinion about potentially controversial topics
like pocket money or the prohibition of some video games. The results obtained
are summarized in Table 2, adapted from Spooren and Sanders (2008:2014).
Table 2. Percentage of elicited relations per domain and per task

Content Speech act Epistemic
Age group
7;2 67.4 28.8 3.8
12;1 53.9 39.0 7.1
Task
image description 94.2 0.8 5.0
conversation 30.0 64.3 5.7
This data confirms the important influence of context here the nature of the
task on the number of relations produced in each domain. In the descriptive
task, relations in the content domain were the most frequent, whereas in the con-
versation task, relations in the speech act domain were predominant. However,
relations in the content domain remained on average the most frequent ones in
the two age groups for the two tasks.
The data also indicates that even children in the first age group were already
able to produce relations in all three domains of use. In order to infer an or-
der of acquisition, Spooren and Sanders have used a statistical method based on
e stablishing a relation between frequency and age of acquisition. The implicit rea-
soning behind this measure is the following: the more frequently a relation is
used, the sooner it has been acquired. Using this method, Spooren and Sanders
have concluded that relations in the content domain, being the most frequent ones
in the first age group for both tasks, were the first to be acquired by the children.
As far as the other domains are concerned, they note that children in the first age
group used on average more speech act than epistemic relations (28.8 against 3.8).
Following the same line of reasoning, this result therefore tends to indicate that
speech act relations are acquired before epistemic relations. However, no signifi-
cant effect related to age has been observed between these two domains. Although
relations in the speech act domain were more frequent than epistemic relations
in both age groups, the group of 12-year-olds did not produce significantly more
occurrences of these relations than the 7-year-old group.
In sum, Spooren and Sanders conclude that the relations in the content do-
main are acquired first, followed by speech act relations and lastly, epistemic rela-
tions. These results do not confirm those obtained by Kyratzis et al., except for the
acquisition of epistemic relations after the other two types. Moreover, the method
used by Spooren and Sanders provides only an indirect measure of the acquisi-
tion process, and does not provide data regarding the age of acquisition for each
domain.
6.1.3 Evers-Vermeul
A third attempt to establish an order of acquisition between domains of use comes

from the work of Evers-Vermeul (2005) who conducted an experiment and ana-
lyzed a corpus of Dutch-speaking children30.
The experiment included two groups of five children each. In the first group,
childrens ages ranged from 4;7 to 4;11, while in the second group, their age range
was 5;5 to 6;5. The goal of this experiment was to determine the order of acquisi-
tion between the speech act and the epistemic domains, using elicitation tasks.
Every child was asked to complete two tasks. The first task, aimed at eliciting
relations in the epistemic domain, involved argumentation skills: children had
to choose a character from a series of pictures, and to convince a puppet that
they had made the right choice. In the second task, aimed at eliciting occurrences
of speech act relations, children were asked to give a series of instructions to a
30. Using the same methodology, Evers-Vermeul and Sanders (2009) have also studied the or-
der of emergence between several Dutch and English connectives. The findings are explained in
terms of the cummulative cognitive complexity of the relation expressed, using the parameters
defined by Sanders et al. (1992) and described in 5.1.2.
uppet to help it place stickers on an image. Children were also asked to explain
p
to the puppet why it had to put the sticker at this particular place, as they were
told that it was very disobedient.
All the utterances produced by the children were recorded and transcribed.
Occurrences of causal relations were counted independently of the use of connec-
tives. Contrary to Kyratzis et al., Evers-Vermeul also took into account cases of in-
complete relations, for instance cases of answers to why questions, in so far as they
were grammatical and the domain of use could be clearly inferred. The 156 causal
relations produced by the children were then classified according to domains of
use. The results obtained in this experiment are summarized in Table3, adapted
from Evers-Vermeul (2005:234).
Table 3. Number of occurrences (%) per domain of use depending on the task
Speech act Epistemic Total
Age group 4;9 5;11 4;9 5;11
Instructions 31 (20%) 19 (12%) 10 (6%) 2 (1%) 62 (40%)
Argumentation 12 (7%) 6 (4%) 31 (20%) 45 (29%) 94 (60%)
Total 43 (27%) 25 (16%) 41 (26%) 47 (30%) 156 (100%)
In this experiment, children from the first age group (mean age of 4;9) were able to
produce both speech act and epistemic relations. The influence of context on the
type of relations produced is somewhat confirmed by the results. Indeed, children
produced more relations in the epistemic domain during the argumentation task,
and more relations in the speech act domain during the task that involved giving
instructions. Lastly, an effect of age was found for epistemic relations, since children
from the second age group produced a significantly greater number of them com-
pared to younger children in the argumentation task, that aimed to elicit them.
This experiment confirmed that children were able to produce relations in
the three domains of use by the age of 4;9. Therefore, in order to determine the
order of acquisition amongst domains, Evers-Vermeul conducted a corpus study
with 12 Dutch-speaking children aged 1;6 to 3;6. She concentrated more specifi-
cally on four causal connectives: want, omdat, dus et daarom. Contrary to previ-
ous studies, results from this corpus study indicate that children were able to use
connectives to produce relations in all three domains of use by the age of three.
It also confirmed that relations in the epistemic domain were acquired later than
the other two domains. On the other hand, no acquisition sequence was found
between the content and the speech act domains, since among the 12 children
studied in the corpus, seven started by producing relations in the content domain
and five in the speech act domain.
In sum, this corpus study does not resolve the question of the order of ac-
quisition between these two domains, which was already a matter of controversy
between Kyratzis et al. and Spooren and Sanders. It has however an important
advantage with respect to these studies, because it is the first study to provide a
precise age of acquisition for the three domains of use.
6.1.4 Comparison of results
The three empirical studies reviewed above do not provide a coherent picture of
the acquisition of domains of use. They also differ on the question of the age of
acquisition for each domain. The study by Spooren and Sanders does not provide
any data on this issue, given that all domains were already acquired even by the
younger children they studied. Moreover, the results obtained by Evers-Vermeul
appear to contradict those obtained by Kyratzis et al. In the first case, children
seem to master all domains of use by the age of three whereas in the second one
almost no correct occurrences were observed in any domain before the age of 3;6.
As far as the order of acquisition between domains is concerned, a compari-
son of results between the studies also reveals important discrepancies. Accord-
ing to Kyratzis et al., speech act uses of connectives are acquired first, whereas in
Spooren and Sanderss study, content relations come first. Lastly, Evers-Vermeuls
results only confirm the difficulty of establishing an order of acquisition between
these domains. The only corroborative result between these studies concerns the
acquisition of epistemic uses, which occurs after the other two domains. However,
the exact age of acquisition of epistemic uses remains controversial. Kyratzis et
al. found that epistemic relations were not produced at all in their first age group
(up to age 3;6) and remained rare even in the age group ranging from 6;7 to 12
years. In striking contrast, Evers-Vermeul found that children were able to pro-
duce epistemic relations by the age of three.
The absence of consensus between these studies can be primarily attributed
to a number of important methodological differences. For example, Kyratzis et
al. only counted occurrences where children had produced the whole causal re-
lation themselves. In consequence, all occurrences starting with the connective
produced in response to a why question were excluded. This choice certainly had
important consequences on the observed order of acquisition, since the first pro-
ductions of causal connectives serve in most cases to relate a clause produced by
the child to a clause produced by another speaker (Diessel 2004; Evers-Vermeul
2005). Therefore, the exclusion of these occurrences probably explains to a large
extent why Kyratzis et al.s study contained no relation in the content domain be-
fore children reached the age of 3;6. The same factor also probably accounts for
the small number of relations produced by children in this age group in their
study. Spooren and Sanders applied the same criterion and also excluded causal
relations that were only partially produced by the children. However, this meth-
odological choice did not lead to the same consequences in their case, since the
children recorded in their corpus were old enough (six years and older) to also
be able to produce many instances of complete causal relations. Evers-Vermeul
did not exclude such occurrences, which is probably why she was able to observe
many content uses from an early age.
Another methodological criterion explaining the differences between the
studies comes from the difficulty of classifying some occurrences. Many uses of
connectives are in reality ambiguous and could be classified in one or the other
domain, depending on the global interpretation given to the sentence. For exam-
ple, the occurrence of because in (4) below could either correspond to a content
or an epistemic use.
(4) John left because he was tired.
Depending on context, the fact that John was tired could be a premise leading the
speaker to conclude that John has probably left (epistemic relation) or it could
be the description of two events (content relation). Moreover, the distinction be-
tween epistemic uses and speech acts of assertion is not always easy. Spooren and
Sanders as well as Evers-Vermeul decided to limit epistemic relations to rela-
tions involving the generation or inference of new knowledge (Evers-Vermeul
2005:233). This restrictive definition of the epistemic domain has probably limit-
ed the total number of occurrences produced in this domain for the two studies.
In sum, all these methodological differences have probably had a great influ-
ence both on the observed order of acquisition between domains and on the age
of acquisition inferred for each of them. Therefore, in order to be able to em-
pirically test the hypotheses presented in the previous chapter, it is necessary to
specify a method that avoids the biases mentioned above, such as the exclusion of
some content uses of connectives on the grounds that the causal relation was not
entirely produced by the child. For the cognitive analysis proposed in this book,
the important factor is that children are able to understand the nature of causal
relations in every domain, regardless of whether they produce them entirely by
themselves or not. Moreover, the theoretical analysis put forward here includes
relations between the acquisition of connectives and other metarepresentational
abilities like the ability to use complement clauses with mental state verbs and
communication verbs. The existing studies provide no data regarding such abili-
ties for the children studied. These questions will be tackled in the original corpus
study presented in the remainder of this chapter.
6.2 The acquisition of the French connective parce que: A corpus study
6.2.1 Data
The data used in this corpus study comes from two corpora taken from the
CHILDES database (MacWhinney 1991). The first corpus (Plunkett 2002) in-
cludes longitudinal data for three children, recorded twice a month at home in
half-hour sessions. The three children were recorded independently and by dif-
ferent experimenters. The second corpus (Suppes et al. 1973) consists of a longi-
tudinal study of one single child, recorded for one hour each week at home. These
two corpora represent all the longitudinal data from French-speaking children
between the ages of 2 and 4 that are available on the CHILDES database. All the
data has been transcribed in the CHAT format.
In the two corpora, the recording sessions took place during a structured ac-
tivity like having a bath or preparing a meal. The interactions involved the target
child and at least one adult, who could either be the experimenter or another fam-
ily member. Three of the four children have been recorded on average between
the ages of 2;3 and 3;4. For the fourth child, recordings started at age 2;8 and con-
tinued until age 4;3. The two corpora included two boys (Max and Philippe) and
two girls (Anne and La). All the children came from similar middle-class socio-
economic backgrounds, from three different French-speaking countries: France
(two children), Canada (one child) and Belgium (one child). Data for each child
is summarized in Table 4.
Table 4. Summary of subjects data

Age at beginning and Corpus containing
Childs name Country of origin
endof the recordings thedata
Anne 1;10.12 3;5.4 France York corpus
La 2;8.22 4;3.21 Belgium York corpus
Max 1;9.19 3;2.23 Canada York corpus
Philippe 2;1.19 3;3.12 France Leveill Corpus
6.2.2 Methodology
The present study focuses exclusively on children recorded between the ages of
two and four years. The lower age bound was set at two because this is the age
when children usually start to produce connectives (Bloom et al. 1980). The upper
age bound was set at four because by that age, children have developed functional
theory of mind abilities (see Chapters 1 and 2). Therefore, from a cognitive point
of view, they should have all the necessary cognitive abilities to deal with all the
uses of connectives. This interval is also consistent with the study conducted by
Evers-Vermeul indicating that children acquire the three domains of use during
this period.
A major methodological issue to be resolved by all natural observation stud-
ies is to define when a given lexical item or construction should be considered as
acquired. In the developmental domain, the fact that production and comprehen-
sion are not synchronized is widely documented (see Chapter 4, Section 4.2.1 for
a discussion). Therefore, the question is when, based on childrens production, is
it possible to conclude that a domain of use has been acquired? I will discuss two
different criteria that can be taken into account: quantity and quality.
In an acquisition model based on the notion of quantity, all occurrences pro-
duced are counted, whether correct or incorrect. A constraint is placed on the
minimal number of occurrences that have to be produced before an item is con-
sidered to be acquired. As far as the acquisition of connectives is concerned, this
type of criterion has notably been applied by Braunwald (1985), who counted all
occurrences of connectives in her data, regardless of their meaning, while placing
a quantitative lower-limit: a connective was considered to be acquired only after
the children had produced five occurrences.
The quantitative method has the advantage of eliminating cases of isolated
productions. From a methodological point of view, it also provides a simple way
to extract data automatically, since no evaluation of the production is required.
However, the application of purely quantitative criteria results in arbitrary deci-
sions. Why should five occurrences rather than four or six be necessary? A more
rational quantitative criterion would be to compare the number of occurrences
produced by the child with those produced by adults during the same period
and to fix the minimal number of occurrences required based on the adults pro-
duction. This criterion would not however measure the emergence of a given
item but rather its adult-like use. For the study conducted here, the interest-
ing aspect is precisely to define when the domains of use emerge in childrens
speech, depending on their developing cognitive abilities. Another limitation
of the quantitative approach is that it provides a binary view of the acquisition
process (acquired or not). It seems more reasonable to think of this process as
a continuum, where children go through several stages until they reach adult-
like competencies. Lastly, even if the quantitative criterion can be adequate to
conduct comparative studies on the acquisition of several connectives, a study
focusing on the domains of use for a single connective must necessarily also in-
volve a qualitative analysis of the data.
In consequence, the analysis of the study described here was mainly based
on quality, in other words only correct occurrences were credited. The notion of
a correct occurrence was defined as an occurrence used to mark a clear causal
relation between clauses. Cases when children produced only part of the relation
themselves for example in response to a why question were also credited, in
so far as they were marking a clear causal relation with the question preceding it
as in (5) below.
(5) Pre: Pourquoi il [le ciel] va tre tout noir?
Father: Why is it [the sky] going to be all dark?
Philippe: Parce quil ny aura pas la lumire. (2;10.3)
Philippe: CONNECTIVE there will be no light.
In addition to incorrect uses of the connective, all occurrences that were either
incomplete as in (6), or that did not correspond to a creative production as in (7)
were also eliminated. Lastly, when a use of the connective was repeated several
times in a row as in (8), only one occurrence was credited. Overall, more than
half of the occurrences were eliminated for one of the reasons mentioned. All the
remaining occurrences have been classified in one of the three domains of use.
(6) Il avait trs mal parce que, il avait trs mal parce que (La 2;8.22)
He was suffering a lot CONNECTIVE, he was suffering a lot
CONNECTIVE
(7) Adult: Il sent les pommes, hein, parce quil est vert.
He smells like apples, right, CONNECTIVE hes green.
Child: Parce quil est vert, hein. (Max 2;6.27)
CONNECTIVE hes green right.
(8) La matresse elle est partie parce que, parce que l cest pas la matresse.
(Anne 3;4.23)
The teacher is gone CONNECTIVE, CONNECTIVE, here its not
the teacher.
Even though the accent was put on the qualitative aspect of productions, a mini-
mal quantitative criterion was also used, in order to avoid a bias related to the way
the productions were interpreted. A domain of use was considered to be acquired
only when two occurrences were produced over a two-month period. In that case,
the age of the earliest production was counted. Given that spontaneous data taken
from corpora are often ambiguous, this criterion was meant to limit the risk of
erroneous interpretations.
6.2.3 Results
The corpus contained more than 900 occurrences of parce que, very unevenly
distributed between the children. Whereas the three children recorded up to the
age of 3;4 produced on average 100 occurrences each, the child recorded up to
the age of 4;3 (La) produced about 600 occurrences. The age of acquisition of the
three domains of use for each child, computed using the criteria described above,
is summarized in Table 5.
Table 5. Age of acquisition of parce que per domain of use and per child31
Content Speech act Epistemic First occurrence
Anne 2;9 2;9 3;1 2;6
La 2;8 2;9 3;0 31
Max 2;6 2;6 3;0 2;4
Philippe 2;6 3;0 3;2 2;6
Two of the four children in the corpus started to produce relations in the content
and the speech act domains simultaneously, and a third child started to produce
relations in the speech act domain just one month after the content domain. Only
one child (Philippe) started to produce speech act uses much later than content
uses. However, this difference can be accounted for by a difference in the context
in which the recordings took place. Contrary to the other children, all recording
sessions for Philippe were strongly directed by the adult. As a consequence, al-
most all occurrences produced by this child are answers to why questions, which
have been classified in the content domain. This fact probably explains at least in
part the late emergence of speech act uses.
The four children started to produce occurrences in the epistemic domain lat-
er than the other two domains. On average, these relations emerged shortly after
the childrens third birthday. The mean age of acquisition for the three domains of
use is summarized in Table 6, with an indication of standard deviations.
Table 6. Mean age of acquisition per domain and standard deviation in months
Content Speech act Epistemic First occurrence
Mean age 2;7 2;9 3;1 2;5
Standard deviation 1.5 2.45 0.96 1.16
31. When the recordings began at 2;8, La was already producing occurrences of parce que. It
is therefore not possible to determine the age of the first production in her case.
The order of acquisition between the three domains of use is illustrated in the
graph in Figure 1, with an indication of 95% confidence intervals computed using
Students Law for t-tests32. Given the influence of context on the onset of produc-
tion for speech act uses in Philippes data, the order of acquisition for the graph
was computed on the basis of the data from the other three children only.
36
32
28
24
Figure 1. Age of acquisition of the three domains of use in months

with 95% confidence intervals
f1
Even though the age of acquisition is on average slightly higher for the speech act
domain than for the content domain (33 months vs. 30 months respectively), this
difference is not statistically significant for the children studied in this corpus (p =
0.31). On the other hand, the difference between the age of acquisition of speech
act40
uses and epistemic uses is statistically significant at the 95% level (p = 0.022).
This difference can also be observed by looking at the confidence intervals in
Figure 1. While there is a large overlap between the upper and lower bounds of
36
the content and speech act domains, the lower and upper bounds of the speech
act and the epistemic domains are separated (as indicated by the dashed line at
32
32. Confidence intervals, as the ones computed here, reflect the likelihood that the average value
observed
28 for a given sample of subjects is close to the objective average of the entire population
(which is unknown). Confidence intervals are defined by the maximal and minimal values that
the objective average could take with a given probability. For example, a confidence interval
24
computed at the 95% level expresses the fact that, for a sample of subjects, there are 95% chances
that the objective Speech
average value for
Communication act population
the entire Mental state within theEpistemic
is situated boundaries of the
uses verbs
verbs Confidence intervals
confidence interval. are computed here using the average uses
value measured
for a population of a given size, as well as the standard deviation of the sample.
about 36 month). These results also confirm previous findings from the literature.
First, relations in the epistemic domain are acquired later than the other domains.
Second, it does not seem possible to determine a sequence of acquisition between
the speech act and the content domains.
The cognitive model of connective uses put forward in this book also makes
hypotheses regarding the kind of cognitive abilities that are required to use con-
nectives in domains involving a metarepresentation, i.e. the speech act and the
epistemic domains. More specifically, the hypothesis proposed was that uses of
connectives in the epistemic domain relied on metacognitive abilities related to
theory of mind abilities, whereas uses in the speech act domain required meta-
communicative abilities similar to other forms of quotation. In order to test these
claims empirically, the age of acquisition of epistemic uses was compared with
that of mental state verbs like think and believe (penser and croire in French) and
the age of acquisition of speech act uses was compared with the acquisition of
communication verbs like say and ask (dire and demander in French). Produc-
tions of these verbs were counted using the same criteria as those defined for
connectives: only correct uses resulting from a creative production of the child
have been taken into account, when at least two occurrences were produced over
a two-month period. The observations found are summarized in Table 7.
Table 7. Comparison between the acquisition of metacognitive and metacommunicative

abilities, including mean age and standard deviation33
metacommunicative abilities metacognitive abilities
speech act communication epistemic mental state
domain verbs domain verbs
Anne 2;9 2;6 3;1 3;1
La 2;9 33 3;0 3;3
Max 2;6 2;5 3;0 3;0
Philippe 3;0 2;6 3;2 2;11
Mean age 2;9 2;6 3;1 3;1
Std deviation 2.45 0.58 0.96 1.71
The results indicate that children are able to produce connectives in the speech
act domain on average at 2;9 but as mentioned above, the significant standard
deviation observed in this case is due to an effect of Philippes corpus. When
computed for the other three children only, the mean age of acquisition is 2;8 and
33. La was already producing communication verbs at the beginning of the recording ses-
sions, at the age of 2;8. Therefore, no data is available in her case.
36
32
the standard deviation for speech act uses goes down to 1.4 month. Communi-
cation verbs are acquired somewhat younger, at 2;6. A strong correlation can be
observed between the onset of epistemic uses of parce que and mental state verbs,
28
both acquired at 3;1 on average. This last result is compatible with the data from
Shatz et al. (1983) and Bartsch and Wellman (1995, see Chapter 4, Section 4.2.2),
who also found that children produce their first genuine uses of mental state verbs
24
in English around the age of three.
Apart from relations in the speech act domain, all these lexical items are ac-
quired with only small variation between the children. When computed with-
out taking Philippes data into account, confidence intervals between the onset of
f1
metacommunicative and metacognitive abilities do not overlap, as indicated by a
dashed line in the graph of Figure 2. These results, although coming from a small
number of subjects, clearly support the hypothesis that metacommunicative abili-
ties are acquired earlier than metacognitive abilities.
40
36
32
28
24
Communication Speech act Mental state Epistemic
verbs uses verbs uses
Figure 2. Acquisition of metacognitive and metacommunicative abilities in months
6.3 Discussion of results
The longitudinal corpus study presented above on the domains of use for the
French connective parce que tends to confirm the main results found in the litera-
ture and is compatible with the only other study with young children, conduct-
ed by Evers-Vermeul (2005). One of the most robust results supported by these
two studies is that epistemic uses of connectives are acquired later than the other
domains, around the age of three. It appears however impossible to determine an
acquisition sequence between the content domain and the speech act domain. In
this section, I will show how the observed order of acquisition matches the theo-
retical hypothesis presented in Chapter 5 (6.3.1). I will also discuss the relation-
ship between the onset of epistemic uses and childrens developing theory of mind
abilities in light of these results (6.3.2). Lastly, I will discuss the possibility that the
observed order of acquisition could be due to the frequency of the different uses
in the input rather than cognitive complexity (6.3.3).
6.3.1 Order of acquisition and cognitive complexity
The theoretical model of connectives put forward in this book distinguished the
three domains of use depending on their inherent cognitive complexity. In Chap-
ter 5 (Section 5.3), three criteria were used to account for the notion of cognitive
complexity: (1) the presence or absence of a metarepresentation, (2) the type of
metarepresented content (utterance or thought), (3) the kind of pragmatic pro-
cess involved (explicature or implicature). Given these criteria, I concluded that
the most complex uses were epistemic uses, followed by speech act and content
uses. I have also argued that speech act uses require metacommunicative abilities
similar to other communication verbs and epistemic uses require metacognitive
abilities similar to mental state verbs.
The only corroborative result found in the literature and observed also in the
current study is that epistemic uses of connectives are acquired later than the
other two domains. This study therefore supports the hypothesis that speech act
uses and epistemic uses rely on different cognitive abilities, and cannot be merged
into a single category of pragmatic uses.
Moreover, the hypothesis that speech act uses require metacommunicative
abilities similar to other forms of quotations is corroborated by the similar age
of acquisition between this domain of use and communication verbs. Similarly,
a strong correlation has been observed between the onset of epistemic uses and
mental state verbs, confirming that childrens metacognitive abilities are acquired
around the age of three. This result is also reminiscent of what was found for
the production of other lexical items related to theory of mind abilities such as
evidentials and epistemic modals (see Chapter 4). Indeed, for all these items, pro-
duction starts around the age of three. This data provides in addition further con-
firmation of the hypothesis put forward by Sperber (2001), stating that humans
metarepresentational abilities are diverse and rely on several cognitive processes,
depending on the type of metarepresented content.
All the studies presented above also indicated that an acquisition sequence
could not reliably be established between the speech act and the content domains.
In the cognitive model presented in Chapter 5, however these two domains were
not treated as equivalent from a cognitive point of view. In the content domain,
the connective acts at the level of the utterances basic explicature while in the
speech act domain, it involves the construction of a metarepresentation contained
in a higher-order explicature. As argued in Chapter 5, the absence of a specific
order for the acquisition of content and speech act uses does not mean that these
domains are equivalent from a cognitive perspective. It simply reflects the fact
that children already possess all the necessary cognitive abilities to produce both
kinds of uses at the onset of production. To put it differently, this lack of difference
in age of acquisition could be due to the fact that when they start to use the con-
nective parce que at around 2;6, children already possess the necessary cognitive
abilities to build metarepresentations. This hypothesis is justified by the fact that
the general embedding process involved in metarepresentations is acquired early,
as indicated by childrens ability to produce complex clauses shortly after the age
of two (Diessel 2004, see Chapter 4). Therefore, the requirement to build a meta-
representation does not influence the age of acquisition.
Another distinction discussed in Chapter 5 was related to the kind of prag-
matic process involved. While the enrichment process takes place at the level of
the explicit content in the case of speech act and content uses, it requires an impli-
cature in the epistemic domain. This difference probably also explains why epis-
temic uses are produced later than the other two domains.
It is worth pointing out that a similar explanation can account for the results
obtained by Evers-Vermeul with Dutch-speaking children. No child in her corpus
produced one of the four studied connectives before the age of 2;8 (2005:240).
Therefore, in that case too, it is probable that children were already able to build
metarepresentations at the onset of production, which enabled them to produce
both speech act and content uses (but not epistemic uses) of the connectives from
the start. For that reason, Evers-Vermeul has not observed a difference in the age
of acquisition between content and speech act uses either.
6.3.2 The acquisition of epistemic uses and theory of mind development
In the study described in this chapter as well as in the work of Evers-Vermeul

(2005), children were able to use connectives in the epistemic domain from the age
of three. The studies reviewed in Chapter 4 indicated that children also start using
other lexical items related to theory of mind abilities around that age. In conse-
quence, all these results tend to show that by the age of three, children are able to
reason about other peoples mental states. However, they are not able to pass a false
belief test before the age of four (Wellman et al. 2001, and Chapters 1 and 2 for a
discussion). Several factors could account for this apparent contradiction.
First, this discrepancy could be explained at least partially by a difference be-

tween comprehension and production, as discussed in Chapter 4 (Section 4.2.1).
It is a well-documented fact in the developmental literature that these two abilities
are not acquired simultaneously by children. In the lexical domain, comprehension
often precedes production. For example, Bloom (2000) argues that most children
understand at least some words by the age of nine months, even though most of
them start to produce words only around their first birthday. However, the reverse
asymmetry has also been noticed in other cases. For instance, Clark (2003:198)
notes that [the] production of some grammatical morphemes precedes mastery
of appropriate usage. In the case of discourse connectives, the fact that produc-
tion to some extent precedes comprehension seems to be confirmed by the signif-
icant number of incorrect uses at the onset of production. Another argument that
corroborates this hypothesis is that the child recorded until the age of 4;3 (La)
showed a strong increase of epistemic uses during the second half of her fourth
year. It is therefore possible that the appropriate usage of epistemic uses is in fact
situated during that period, and therefore at an age compatible with the transition
between failure and success at the false belief task. Lastly, another factor indicat-
ing that the hypothesis of a discrepancy between production and comprehension
might be on the right track comes from studies on other lexical items related to
theory of mind presented in Chapter 4. Even though children produce all these
lexical items by the age of three, experiments measuring comprehension find that
they do not have a full mastery of these items before the age of four.
Another possible line of explanation is that the tests devised to measure the
comprehension of these lexical items are biased by external constraints that ar-
tificially delay the age of success. As argued in Chapter 1 (Section 1.1.2), many
authors have formulated such criticisms against the false belief test, as a mea-
sure of theory of mind abilities. For example, Bloom and German (2000) have
stressed that passing the test requires more complex abilities than simple mental
state attribution, notably because it is linguistically complex and requires impor-
tant memory skills. This hypothesis is further corroborated by the fact that many
three-year-old children are already able to pass a simplified version of the test
(Siegal and Beattie 1991; Surian and Leslie 1999). Moreover, Clements and Perner
(1994) have found that three-year-old children who fail the test direct their gaze
in the right direction (see Chapter 2, Section 2.2.1.4). In sum, it seems that at
the age of three, children already have an implicit understanding of false belief.
Therefore, it is possible that the use of lexical items requiring theory of mind
abilities requires only an implicit understanding rather than the ability to reason
explicitly about beliefs.
Lastly, the discrepancy between the first productions of epistemic uses of con-
nectives and the age of success at the false belief test could also be explained by a
specialization of mentalizing abilities in the domain of verbal communication. This

explanation corresponds to a proposal put forward by Sperber and Wilson (2002)
and discussed in Chapter 1 (Section 1.2.4). If theory of mind abilities are conceived
in a modular way, one sub-module of the theory of mind module, dedicated to
verbal communication, could be operational earlier that the more general module.
This hypothesis has found some confirmation in a study by Happ and Loth (2002),
showing that children are able to attribute false beliefs to other people before the age
of four when the task involves lexical acquisition. However, this hypothesis remains
for the time being the most speculative of the three explanations presented here.
6.3.3 Cognitive complexity or parental input?
In this book, I have proposed the hypothesis that the order of acquisition between
domains of use should reflect their intrinsic cognitive complexity. However, this
factor is not the only possible way to explain the emergence of domains of use. An
alternative explanation comes from usage-based theories of language acquisition,
that postulate the existence of a direct correlation between the quantity of input
and the acquisition process (for instance Tomasello 2003). From that perspective,
the more frequently a lexical item is found in the input, the earlier it should be
acquired by the children.
In the domain of connectives and theory of mind abilities, some studies seem
to indicate that this factor does indeed play an important role in the acquisition
process. In a longitudinal corpus study, Diessel (2004) found that connectives
used very frequently by mothers tended to be produced earlier by the children,
whereas those that were only infrequently used appeared later. In a growth curve
study, Van Venn et al. (2009) also found that parental input had an influence on
the acquisition of German connectives in one child. Interestingly, these authors
looked at the role of local input, that is the input received during a recording ses-
sion, as well as the global cumulative input. They found that both kinds of input
were important for the childs production, but that the factor of age and hence the
development of conceptual abilities also explained part of this development. Sim-
ilarly, in the domain of theory of mind abilities, a study by Peterson and Slaughter
(2003) indicates that the more frequently mothers provide explanations in terms
of mental states, the sooner children develop theory of mind abilities34.
In the lexical domain, it seems rather uncontroversial that the quantity of
input should determine to a certain extent the age of acquisition. It is indeed quite
34. The role of genetic vs. environmental factors for theory of mind development is discussed
in Chapter 2, Section 2.2.4.
improbable that children will start to produce words they have almost never heard
rather than words that are part of their daily life. As far as French causal connec-
tives are concerned, this factor certainly explains the very late emergence of car, a
connective that is not more complex than parce que from a cognitive perspective
(see Chapter 5), and even easier to process than parce que from a phonological
point of view. However, its almost complete disappearance from contemporary
spoken French prevents children from using it at an early age.
Despite this general tendency for a correlation between input and age of acqui-
sition, the more specific question is whether the factor of parental input provides
better predictions for the order of acquisition between domains than the factor of
cognitive complexity. In order to assess this hypothesis, the production of parce
que by one of the children from the corpus (Anne) was systematically compared
with the productions of the adults interacting with her during the recording ses-
sions. The criteria for selecting and classifying adults occurrences were the same
as those used for the childrens data.
The variation in time of the production of parce que by adults in the three
domains of use is illustrated in the graph in Figure 3. Annes age is represented on
the horizontal axis and the number of connectives produced on the vertical axis.
Given that the number of connectives produced varies depending on the con-
text of interaction (Sanders 1997), the productions have been grouped in three-
months periods, indicated in the horizontal axis, in order to smooth variation35.
f3 Figure 3. Quantity of input for parce que per domain of use (3-month intervals)
35. The last period starting at 39 months was only two months long. The number of connec-
tives has therefore been multiplied by 1.5 in order to get data comparable with earlier periods.
f3
The evolution of Annes production of connectives per domain during the same pe-
riod is represented according to the same principles in the graph in Figure 4 below.
f4 Figure 4. Evolution of the production of parce que per domains of use (3-months intervals)
The first noticeable result from this comparison is that all three domains of use
are present in the input from the beginning. However, epistemic uses are less
frequent than the other two domains (23% of the input on average), which could
potentially indicate that the late acquisition of this domain of use could be due
to its scarcity in the input. However, this hypothesis is contradicted by the fact
that a similar discrepancy is observed between the content domain (45% of the
input) and the speech act domain (32%). This difference did however not lead to
any significant difference in the age of acquisition between these two domains,
since their production started simultaneously in Annes data. Moreover, from
a quantitative perspective, Annes production started with a higher number of
occurrences in the speech act domain, even though occurrences of this domain
were less frequent than occurrences of the content domain in the input during
this period.
In conclusion, even though the input received should play some role in
childrens lexical development, it appears that the order of acquisition between
domains of use is more coherently explained by a difference in cognitive com-
plexity. A larger-scale study should ascertain the validity of both hypotheses in
a more reliable way.
6.4 The use of parce que by autistic children
In addition to the normal acquisition of domains of use, the theoretical analysis

proposed in Chapter 5 also leads to specific hypotheses regarding the use of con-
nectives by autistic subjects. I argued that uses in the epistemic domain required
theory of mind abilities. Because of their theory of mind deficit, it is therefore to
be expected that the autistic population will be impaired in the use of connec-
tives in this domain. But there is also another reason to expect difficulties with
epistemic uses. Many studies conducted with this population indicate that autistic
subjects find it difficult to access the meanings implicitly communicated by utter-
ances. As argued in Chapter 5, the meaning communicated by connectives in the
epistemic domain is conveyed by an implicature. It is therefore probable that this
requirement adds to the difficulty of the epistemic domain for this population.
Another theoretical distinction was made in Chapter 5 between speech act
and epistemic uses on the one hand, that required the construction of a metarep-
resentation, and content uses on the other. There is no reason to suppose how-
ever that this distinction has consequences for the autistic population. A study by
Baron-Cohen (1997, see Chapter 5, Section 5.3) has shown that autistic children
were unable to answer questions targeting mental states but had the necessary
cognitive abilities to answer questions targeting speech acts. In other words, they
were able to deal with metarepresentations of utterances. In sum, it is expected
that autistic subjects should be specifically impaired in the use of connectives in
the epistemic domain.
In Chapter 3, it was also stressed that the whole array of communication dif-
ficulties experienced by autistic subjects could not be explained by their theory
of mind deficit alone. I have argued that the weak central coherence hypothesis
(Frith and Happ 1994) was useful to explain some of these impairments, notably
the inability to use context in order to assign a meaning to words and utterances.
It is probable that this other characteristic of autism has direct consequences for
the use of connectives by this population. More specifically, it is to be expected
that autistic subjects will be impaired when the use of a connective implies a link
at a higher level than the clause as in (9) or when it relates a proposition to non-
linguistic content as in (10). Such uses of connectives have notably been discussed
by Blakemore (1987, 2002).
(9) He has been fired. His girlfriend threw him out. He has the flu. However, I
thought he looked extremely cheerful today.
(10) [Context: Peter enters the classroom quietly 20 minutes after the beginning
of the lesson.]
Mary: Because you think I havent seen you?
In the literature on autism, no study has specifically investigated the use of con-
nectives. However, some works mention an impairment in passing, as for example
Frith (1989:128), who notes that autistic subjects have a tendency to use connec-
tives marking a topic change such as by the way or well, anyway in an inappropri-
ate manner, without introducing a new subject of conversation. In a comparative
study with autistic, SLI and normally developing children, Baltaxe and dAngiola
(1992) have also concluded that autistic children were impaired in the use of con-
junctions as cohesion markers. Apart from these studies, no systematic investiga-
tion was carried out on the use of connectives, or a fortiori their domains of use,
by the autistic population.
In order to get a preliminary empirical answer to this question, I studied the
production of parce que in the CHILDES database. Only one corpus (Foudon et al.
2007) contains recordings of French-speaking autistic children. It includes eight
children from three to nine years old recorded over three years, but the whole
corpus contains only two occurrences of the connective, one in isolation and one
in the content domain. In order to compensate for this lack of data, I gathered two
small corpora, with five higher-functioning autistic adolescents aged from 10 to
17 years, recorded in two different contexts. The first corpus is a two-hour televi-
sion show in which the teenagers were interacting with their families and partici-
pated in a debate. The second corpus included two hours of interactions between
an autistic teenager and his speech therapist. Every subject produced an average
of ten interpretable occurrences of the connective. Almost all occurrences were
answers to why questions and could be classified in the content domain. Two oc-
currences were speech act uses. No use in the epistemic domain was registered.
For English, the corpus gathered by Tager-Flusberg (1990) with six autistic
children contains productions of the connective because. However, these produc-
tions are due to only one highly verbal child named Brett (with a mean length of
utterance of 3.74 at the beginning of the study) who produced 67 occurrences of
the connective, from which only two were not sentence initial (i.e. answers to why
questions) and all corresponded to uses in the content domain.
These first preliminary indications on the use of parce que and because by
autistic children and teenagers are insufficient to draw firm conclusions, but the
results are nevertheless compatible with the hypothesis of a relation between epis-
temic uses and theory of mind abilities. Even though no epistemic use was found,
these subjects were able to produce the connective in the other domains, espe-
cially the content domain. This latter result does not necessarily mean however
that the content domain is more accessible than the speech act domain for autistic
subjects. It could reflect the fact that autistic subjects are unlikely to initiate con-
versations and often only limit themselves to answer questions asked by others,
hence the predominance of why questions in all the corpora.
In conclusion, this preliminary data indicates that it is worth pursuing further

the hypothesis of a specific deficit in the epistemic domain for autistic subjects.
However, no firm conclusion can be drawn for the time being on the basis of these
results, first because of the scarcity of the data, but also because of the limitations
inherent in corpus studies. I have stressed in Chapter 3 the importance of non-
verbal IQ for many linguistic tasks in autism. I have also indicated that about
twenty percent of autistic subjects are able to pass the false belief test. However,
this information cannot be deduced from corpora, with the result that the analy-
sis of production could potentially be biased. For these reasons, in the case of au-
tistic subjects, this data must necessarily be complemented by other experimental
methods that enable direct access to the tested population.
6.5 Summary
In this chapter, I have presented results from a longitudinal corpus study on the
acquisition of domains of use for the French causal connective parce que. I have
argued that these results corroborate the theoretical hypotheses put forward in
Chapter 5. The difference between speech act uses and epistemic uses in terms of
cognitive complexity has notably been reflected in the different age of acquisition
for these two domains. The analysis presented in terms of metarepresentation has
also been corroborated by the similar age of acquisition for other lexical items like
communication and mental state verbs. A comparative analysis of the production
of one child and the adults interacting with her has also indicated that the factor
of frequency in the input was unlikely to account for the observed order of ac-
quisition between domains. Lastly, some preliminary observations on the use of
connectives by autistic children and teenagers provided preliminary confirmation
that this population is impaired in the use of connectives in the epistemic domain.
This result also pointed to the necessity of conducting other research on the use
of connectives by this population, using other empirical methods than natural
observation.
chapter 7
Empirical study on the acquisition

of the French connective puisque
In the theoretical analysis of puisque presented in Chapter 5, it was argued that

this connective bears a special relationship to theory of mind abilities in con-
trast to other French causal connectives like parce que or car. More specifically,
this theoretical analysis demonstrated that the peculiarity of puisque is that the
cause segment (situated after the connective) always contains echoic content.
In consequence, the information conveyed in this segment includes a double
embedding of representations. Following an argument recently put forward by
Wilson (forthcoming), I concluded however that this property did not necessar-
ily imply that all uses of puisque require de facto second-order theory of mind
abilities. The important property for a correlation with second-order theory of
mind abilities rather seems to be the epistemic attitude conveyed by the speak-
er, namely that the speaker takes a specifically dissociative attitude. Only some
uses of puisque satisfy this requirement, when the connective is used to con-
vey ironic meaning. Therefore, I made the hypothesis that acquiring these uses
of puisque should be specifically related to the development of second-order
theory of mind abilities. Other uses of this connective only require first-order
theory of mind abilities.
From a cognitive point of view, all non-ironic uses of puisque are nevertheless
more complex than the epistemic uses of parce que discussed in Chapter6. This
difference is due to the fact that they require the construction of two metarepre-
sented contents one in the segment before the connective and the other in the
segment after it whereas in the case of parce que or car only the segment pre-
ceding the connective contains a metarepresentation. For this reason, it is to be
expected that all uses of puisque should be acquired later than uses of parce que.
No study in the literature has so far addressed the acquisition of puisque.
This chapter will open with a corpus study tracking the emergence of the pro-
duction of this connective (7.1). Given that, to the best of my knowledge, no
corpus contains substantial longitudinal data for French-speaking children over
the age of four, the acquisition of later uses of this connective were tested by a
comprehension experiment, focusing on the correlation between ironic uses of
puisque and the development of second-order theory of mind abilities. As an

introduction to this experiment, Section 7.2 discusses previous studies on the
acquisition of irony and Section 7.3 reviews existing second-order theory of
mind tests. Section 7.4 details the goals and methodology used in the experi-
ment. Results are given in Section 7.5 and discussed in Section 7.6, shedding
light on the initial hypotheses.
In addition to providing another means of investigating the relationship be-
tween theory of mind and uses of connectives, this experimental investigation also
allows for the verification of other hypotheses related to the theoretical analysis
of puisque presented in Chapter 5. Firstly, it was argued that puisque is specifically
dedicated to conveying ironic meaning. Therefore, it should not be possible to
replace it by other causal connectives like parce que in this context. Secondly, even
though connectives are not indispensable in conveying coherence relations, some
experiments (for instance Millis and Just 1994) tend to indicate that by making
this relation explicit, the presence of connectives facilitates sentence comprehen-
sion. In the case of puisque, it is therefore probable that, because of its frequent
association with ironic meaning, the use of this connective can facilitate the com-
prehension of irony for young children, compared to an ironic sentence that does
not contain any specific linguistic marking. These hypotheses will also be assessed
empirically in this chapter, in Section 7.4.
7.1 Corpus data for the acquisition of puisque
7.1.1 Production of puisque between age two and four
Occurrences of the connective puisque were gathered from the same longitudinal
corpora from the CHILDES database as those used for parce que in Chapter 6.
Four children, two boys and two girls, were recorded on average between the ages
of 2;0 and 3;6, though one of the children (La) was recorded up to the age of 4;3.
The methodological criteria used for the extraction and classification of occur-
rences of puisque are the same as those described in Chapter 6 (Section 6.2.2) for
parce que. That is, only correct and creative occurrences36 were credited. Occur-
rence counts for each child are given in Table 1.
36. The notion of creative occurrence was defined in Chapter 6 as an occurrence that was not a
mere repetition of another speakers utterance.
Chapter 7. Empirical study on the acquisition of the French connective puisque 149
Table 1. Production of puisque between two and four years

Number of creative Total number Age of first
occurrences of occurrences occurrence
Max 0 0
La 4 7 3;0
Anne 0 0
Philippe 1 4 3;3
Two of the four children started to produce the connective shortly after age three.
However, this early production does not necessarily mean that they have acquired
the meaning of puisque at that age. First, from a quantitative point of view, their
production is too limited to draw firm conclusions. Philippe produced only one
occurrence and there was a gap of eight months between Las first and second
productions of the connective. After that, the remaining two occurrences were
produced within a two-months interval, between the ages of 3;8 and 3;10. From
a quantitative point of view, it is therefore possible to conclude that La may have
actually acquired the connective puisque shortly before the age of four, according
to the criteria defined in Chapter 6 (Section 6.2.2).
A detailed analysis of these productions, reproduced in (1) to (4) below, in-
dicates that the conclusion that La has acquired puisque before the age of four
must however be treated with caution. A use of puisque can indeed be considered
to be correct only if it conveys a clearly echoic meaning, as defined in Chapter 5.
In Example (1) below, the use of puisque might echo a fact treated as obvious in
context, namely that Las grandmother feels cold. No mention could be found
however in the context of interaction indicating that this information was part of
the common background. It should also be noted that La produced the connec-
tive after making a first attempt with parce que. This apparent confusion indicates
that she does not reliably differentiate the two connectives.
(1) La: moi, je ne saurais37 pas te lattacher, hein. Parce que, parce que
La: I dont know how to tie it. CONNECTIVE, CONNECTIVE
Grand-mre : tantt tu savais.
Grandmother: before you knew.
La : puisque tu as froid il faut lattacher. (3;0.05)
La: CONNECTIVE you feel cold you have to tie it.
37. This use of the modal savoir is specific to Belgium French and corresponds to pouvoir in
other varieties of French.
In Example (2) below a use of parce que followed by puisque can also be observed,
indicating again that the meaning of these two connectives might not be clearly
differentiated in Las mind. Again, this use of puisque might (in a charitable in-
terpretation) correspond to a case where the fact echoed is treated as obvious in
context, given that the hair color of the puppet is observable by both participants
in the conversation. However, this occurrence does not correspond to an accept-
able adult-like production of the connective either.
(2) La: Non, lui, cest le petit garon parce quil a des cheveux. Non, mais
cest quand mme un petit garon puisquil a des cheveux bruns,
eh ben cest un petit garon. Et puisque lui, il a des cheveux
blonds, cest une petite fille. Jai dcid, cest comme a. (3;8.26)
La: no, its a little boy CONNECTIVE hes got hair. No, but its still
a little boy CONNECTIVE hes got brown hair, well then its a
little boy. And CONNECTIVE hes got blond hair, its a little girl.
I have decided, its like that.
Parrain: ah les petites filles, elles ont des cheveux blonds alors?
Godfather: oh, little girls have blond hair then?
La : ah oui.
La: well yes.
Example (3) below provides an indication that the echoic meaning of puisque is
probably still not completely acquired by La. In her first sentence, La presents
as obvious the fact that she is ill. But her grandmothers surprised reaction indi-
cates that this information was probably not part of the common ground. Using
puisque is that case is therefore not appropriate.
(3) La: moi, je bois beaucoup puisque je suis malade, moi. (3;10.07)
La: I drink a lot CONNECTIVE I am ill.
Grand-mre : tu es malade, toi ?
Grandmother: you are ill?
La : oui je suis malade.
La: yes I am ill.
In Example (4) below, the use of puisque might be interpreted as echoing some
information treated as obvious by La. The information conveyed (La has to look
after her grandmother) is however clearly not shared and the use of puisque can
be considered acceptable only in so far as La is using it as a joke. The corpus does
not provide enough indications to establish with certainty if this use of puisque
was deliberate or simply mistaken.
(4) Grand-mre : tu ne vas jamais promener avec maman, toi ?
Grandmother: you never go for a walk with your mummy?
La : si, mais sauf quand vous veniez je ne saurais pas aller me

promener puisque je dois vous surveiller. (3;10.27)
La: yes, but when you come I cannot got for a walk CONNECTIVE
I must look after you.
Grand-mre : ben videmment.
Grandmother: well of course.
In sum, given the scarcity of the data, it is not possible to conclude that any of the
children has acquired the connective puisque between the ages of three and four.
It is worth noting however that all Las attempts correspond at best to uses where
puisque only requires one level of theory of mind abilities according to the analy-
sis presented in Chapter 5. More complex uses, such as those involving irony, are
clearly absent from the corpus.
7.1.2 Parental input for the connective puisque
As discussed in Chapter 6 (Section 6.3.3), cognitive complexity is not the only

factor accounting for the emergence of a lexical item in childrens speech. The
criterion of frequency in the input is also an important factor. As an indication of
the role of input for the acquisition of puisque, the number of its occurrences in
the input was counted for each child in the corpus.
Table 2. Occurrences of puisque per child in relation to the quantity of input

Number of occurrences in input Number of creative occurrences
Max 3 0
La 11 4
Anne 6 0
Philippe 14 1
The data shown in Table 2 indicates that children get a very limited amount of
input for the connective puisque, with less than 10 occurrences on average, and
those of the children who actually produce the connective are also those who
get more input. This fact therefore tends to indicate that the absence of puisque
in some childrens speech until the age of four might be due to its scarcity in the
input. For example, Anne was exposed to only 6 occurrences of puisque and as
many as 184 occurrences of parce que during the entire recording period. This
difference of frequency in the use of puisque with respect to parce que is however
not specific to child directed speech, and puisque is also much less frequent than
parce que in corpora involving only adult participants (Zufferey 2007).
However, despite its scarcity in the input, two of the children have neverthe-
less begun to produce the connective. Therefore, scarcity in the input cannot be
the only reason why puisque is not yet fully acquired by the children. The detailed
examination of the first productions of puisque found in the corpus and presented
above rather tends to indicate that children do not yet master the complex condi-
tions of use for the connective and tend to treat it as a variant of parce que. Even
though it does not provide sufficient data to determine the age of acquisition of
puisque, this corpus study provides a first confirmation that puisque is in any case
acquired later than parce que by the four children under investigation.
The remainder of the chapter will be dedicated to exploring the relationship
between the acquisition of the more complex uses of puisque, when it is used to
convey irony, and second-order theory of mind abilities.
7.2 The acquisition of irony
7.2.1 Developmental data
In the developmental literature on irony, no consensus has emerged regarding the

exact age of its acquisition. Some studies conclude that children do not reliably
understand the meaning of ironic utterances before the age of 13 (Demorest et al.
1983; Demorest et al. 1984) while others find that irony is acquired at a younger
age, between six and eight years (Ackerman 1983; Winner 1988). In any case,
what seems to be uncontroversial is that children do not understand irony before
the age of six.
As Winner (1988) observes, even though they fail the tests that measure the
full understanding of irony, four- and five-year-old children are already able to
understand that an ironic utterance is false, and sometimes even that the speaker
of this utterance had the intention of producing a false utterance. However, they
do not yet understand the speakers communicative intention, which is to pro-
duce an ironic utterance.
In the theoretical analysis of irony proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1978,
1986) and Wilson (2006), irony is analyzed as a case of echoic language use where
the speaker takes a tacitly dissociative attitude towards the echoed content. The
early achievements of four- and five-year-old children described by Winner fit
naturally into this analysis. The ability to understand that a speaker has produced
an utterance that is literally false requires only one level of theory of mind abili-
ties. This is the reason why, in Sperbers terminology (1994, see Chapter 1, Sec-
tion1.2.3), a hearer applying the strategy of cautious optimism understands that
a speaker can be incompetent and therefore manages to recover his meaning even
when his utterance is literally false. In consequence, it is not surprising that chil-
dren should understand it by the age of four, when they have developed first-order
theory of mind abilities. The situation is more complex when children understand
that the speaker had the intention to produce a false utterance. This corresponds
to a case of deception, and understanding the difference between deception and
irony requires second-order theory of mind abilities, available only to speakers
applying the strategy called sophisticated understanding by Sperber. The reasoning
required to understand deception is illustrated in (5) and the process underlying
irony is illustrated in (6) below.
(5) [The speaker has the intention that [the hearer believes that X]] and [the
speaker knows that [X is false]].
(6) [The speaker has the intention that [the hearer does not believe that X]] and
[the speaker knows that [X is false]].
Winner does not provide data regarding the percentage of children who are al-
ready able to perform this reasoning at the age of five, but it is to be expected
that a majority of them still fail to make this distinction. As will be argued below,
only a minority of children pass second-order false belief tests at that age. How-
ever, even for these children, the comprehension of irony remains problematic,
because it also requires the ability to understand the reason why a speaker may
voluntarily want to communicate false information and at the same time want the
hearer to recognize his intention.
Most of the developmental studies on the acquisition of irony do not adopt
the theoretical framework proposed by Sperber and Wilson, but are based on a
rhetorical analysis of irony, analyzed as a trope where the speaker communicates
the opposite of what he says. A study by Keenan and Quigley (1999) has however
addressed the question of the role of echo in the understanding of ironic utter-
ances. The authors presented children aged six to ten years with utterances where
the ironic comment referred explicitly to a previous utterance and others where
the reference to a previous utterance was only implicit. Results indicate that when
an ironic utterance is pronounced with a neutral prosody, the fact that it echoes an
element explicitly presented earlier facilitates the understanding of irony. This study
therefore confirms the importance of the echoic factor in the processing of irony.
The fact that rhetorical analyses of irony prevail in developmental studies
also implies that relations between the acquisition of irony and advanced the-
ory of mind abilities have seldom been studied, except by Winner and Leekam
(1991), who made the hypothesis that the ability to differentiate irony and lies
required advanced theory of mind abilities. Results from this study confirmed
that this difference relied on the ability to identify the speakers communicative
intention, inother words, his willingness to let the hearer recognize the falsity
of his utterance. These authors have not however tested childrens ability to pass
advanced theory of mind tests. In this respect, only the work by Happ (1993,
1994) confirmed the existence of this correlation for autistic, mentally-retarded
and normally developing children. I will come back to the methodology used in
these studies in the next section, because I have chosen to use the same methodol-
ogy for the experiment on the acquisition of puisque.
It is also worth noting that often, in the case of ironic utterances, the speakers
meaning is not only conveyed by an echoic linguistic meaning but also by a series
of non-linguistic clues related to prosody and gestures. Several studies summa-
rized by Winner (1988) have assessed the roles of these two factors in processing
ironic utterances by children and adults. In the case of adults, the presence of both
factors considerably improves processing speed, but when only one factor can be
used, gestures seemed to play a more important role than prosody. In a study with
six and eight-year-old children, Winner et al. (1987) concluded that the process-
ing of irony was the same when eight-year-old children read the ironic utter-
ance themselves or heard it pronounced with an appropriate prosody. However, as
Winner (1988) observes, eight-year-old children already understood irony with
or without the correct prosody, and the import of this factor can therefore not be
assessed in this context. In the case of six-year-old children, their limited reading
skills did not make the experiment possible. Lastly, Ackerman (1983) also found
that prosody is useful but that context is the determining factor for the compre-
hension of irony by six-year-old children.
7.2.2 Measures used to test the comprehension of irony
All the tests designed to measure the comprehension of irony consist in a series of
short stories ending with an ironic statement. In some cases, the same stories end
alternatively with literally true statements uttered in a sincere or neutral tone of
voice, in order to control for childrens general memory and comprehension abili-
ties. In other cases, stories end alternatively with a metaphor or a lie, in order to
compute childrens abilities to deal with other types of non-literal communication.
As mentioned in the last section, irony often comes with a specific prosody, and
this prosody is usually preserved when the stimulus is presented orally. The main
difference between these tests lies in the method used to evaluate the comprehen-
sion of irony, depending on the kinds of questions asked at the end of the test.
In one of the first empirical studies on the acquisition of irony, Ackerman
(1981) asked three different questions at the end of the stories. One was about
the facts presented in the story, another about the characters mental states and
a third about the communicative intention of the speaker who uttered the ironic
statement. For example, one of the stories involved two characters, Billy and his
brother. Billys brother ran a race and lost. Billy, who had watched the race, said:
Isee you won again. Children then had to answer the following questions:
1. Did Billys brother run well? (fact)
2. Did Billy know how well his brother had run? (belief)
3. Was Billy pleased with his brothers performance? (intention)
Questions 2 and 3, targeting important abilities for the understanding of irony,
are however potentially controversial. First, the question targeting the compre-
hension of beliefs (2) is asked using the verb know rather than believe or think, and
some studies showed that the ability to reason about what a character knows or
not is easier than to reason about his beliefs (Hogrefe et al. 1986). Moreover, the
question targeting the comprehension of irony (3) does not bear on the speakers
communicative intention but only on his personal feelings about the outcome of
the race. It is indeed possible that Billy has a private opinion about his brothers
performance but wants to communicate different information in his utterance.
In consequence, this question might not be the most accurate way to evaluate
childrens comprehension of irony as a communicative intention.
A different evaluation method was used by Demorest et al. (1983) who asked
children two questions. In the first one, they had to decide if the ironic utter-
ance was true or false and in the second one, to explain why the speaker had said
that. The main advantage of this method is that the comprehension of irony is
assessed by direct means. However, as Winner (1988:139) observes, the fact that
this evaluation contains an open question increases its level of metalinguistic dif-
ficulty. It is therefore possible that children fail because they are unable to explain
the ironic meaning conveyed by the utterance, but still understand it implicitly.
The difference between explicit and implicit understanding of a phenomenon was
already discussed in Chapter 2 (Section 2.2.3), in relation to the age of success at
first-order theory of mind tests.
Demorest et al. (1984)ran a second study, this time asking questions simi-
lar to those found in Ackermans study, with some modifications. In one of their
stories, two friends go swimming in a lake. One of them dives into the water and
invites the other to come in saying: cmon in, the waters warm. In the ironic ver-
sion, the water is in fact cold, and this information is conveyed by the fact that the
character who dived shrieks, and the tone of voice is ironic. Children were asked
to answer the following questions:
1. Was the water warm or cold? (fact)
2. Did he [the child who dived] think the water was warm or cold? (belief)
3. Did he want his friend to think the water was warm or cold? (intention)
These questions are not as problematic as in Ackermans study. This time, the
question bearing on the speakers belief contains the verb think rather than know.
Moreover, the question targeting the speakers intentions does not bear on the
feelings of the speaker but on his communicative intention. One of the main ad-
vantages of this study is that it allows a comparison to be made between the under-
standing of lies and irony, depending on childrens answers to the third question.
If a child answers warm to this question, he indicates that according to his un-
derstanding, the speaker did not want the hearer to recognize his communicative
intention. On the other hand, if he answers cold, he indicates that he understood
that the speaker wanted the hearer to recognize his intention. In consequence, he
understands that his statement was not a lie but a mark of irony. From the point
of view of theory of mind abilities, these three questions also require different
kinds of abilities. While an answer to the first question can be given in the absence
of any of these abilities, the second question requires first-order theory of mind
abilities and the third question requires second-order theory of mind abilities.
Winner(1988) criticized these tests on the grounds that their intrinsic dif-
ficulty may artificially delay the age of success. More specifically, Winner stresses
that understanding the stories requires important memory skills because the
ironic component of the story sometimes bears on one detail that is mocked.
Winner has therefore decided to simplify the stories as well as the test questions.
In her study, children were asked if the speaker was lying, mistaken or teasing. She
also administered the same children tests with conditions similar to those used
in the study by Demorest et al. (1984). The results obtained indicate in fact that
the simplifications did not significantly improve the scores obtained by young
children. In conclusion, the hypothesis that all previous tests were intrinsically
too difficult can be rejected.
Happ (1993, 1994) compared the ability of autistic, mentally-retarded and
normally developing children to understand ironic utterances, in relation to the
development of their theory of mind abilities. In these studies, comprehension
was measured using two questions: one forced-choice and one open question, of
a format similar to those in the study by Demorest et al. (1983). In a first study,
children were asked why the speaker had said something, and then if the speaker
literally meant what he said or the contrary. For instance, for the ironic utterance
that was clever children were asked if the speaker meant to say that the charac-
ter had done something clever or stupid. In a second study (1994), children were
first asked if what the speaker said was true or false, and then why he had said
that. Results from these studies confirmed that the ability to understand irony was
correlated with success at second-order theory of mind tasks.
In conclusion, the methods used to assess the comprehension of irony in
these studies can be divided into two categories: those consisting in inferring
c omprehension on the basis of answers to forced-choice questions and those

consisting in asking children for a spontaneous explanation about the speakers
communicative intention. The first category of studies has the advantage of being
easier to process for the children and easily coded by the experimenters. However,
for this kind of questions, the probability of getting the correct answer by chance
is fifty percent. These tests must therefore be repeated a sufficient number of times
to provide statistically significant results. If only a few measures can be obtained
for every experimental condition, justification questions are indispensable to as-
certain the childrens comprehension.
7.3 The development of second-order theory of mind abilities
7.3.1 The Perner and Wimmer test
The first study to assess second-order (advanced) theory of mind abilities was
conducted by Perner et Wimmer (1985). These authors devised a series of six
experiments in order to measure five- to ten-year-old childrens ability to reason
about second-order beliefs (beliefs about beliefs), using a method similar to the
classical version of the false belief task.
In this task, children listen to a story featuring two characters, John and
Mary, that bears on the location of a specific object: an ice-cream van. In the
first episode, the two characters hear that the ice-cream van will stay all after-
noon in the park. In a second episode, only John is informed of an unexpected
program change: the van will move to the church and stay there all day. In a
third episode, Mary is informed by the ice-cream man that the van has moved
to the church, but John does not know that Mary got that information. In the
last episode, John goes to Marys home in the afternoon and is told that she went
out to get an ice-cream.
Children are then asked a question to assess their second-order theory of
mind abilities (1), a justification question (2), and three control questions (35).
1. Where does John think that Mary has gone?
2. Why does he think that she has gone to______[answer to question 1]?
3. Does Mary know that the ice-cream van is at the church?
4. Does John know that the ice-cream man has talked to Mary?
5. Where did Mary go for her ice-cream?
In order to answer questions (1) and (2) correctly, children have to be able to
understand that John holds a false belief about Marys belief, a reasoning that re-
quires second-order theory of mind abilities. The authors ran several versions of
this test. For example, in some cases, they inserted a reminder about a key aspect
of the story while in others not. Moreover, sometimes they asked the false belief
question immediately after revealing the existence of a false belief while in other
cases these questions were only posed at the end of the story.
Results obtained in this study indicate that, depending on the two param-
eters described above, the percentage of six-year-old children who are able to
form second-order beliefs varies between 12% when no reminder was included
and children were not asked the false belief question immediately and 66% when
these parameters were reversed. For seven-year-old children, the lower bound
was 36% and the upper bound was 78%. Perner and Wimmer concluded that six-
year-old children are able to attribute second-order beliefs when the conditions
are optimal and seven-year-old children can do it most of the time regardless of
the testing conditions.
7.3.2 The earliest age of success for second-order theory of mind tests
Some studies tried to determine if younger children could pass simpler versions
of the second-order false belief test. For example, Sullivan et al. (1994) made some
modifications to Perner and Wimmers original test by shortening the stories as
well as reducing the number of episodes and characters. Moreover, they gave chil-
dren explicit reminders about the key aspects of the story and provided corrective
feedback when children did not answer control questions correctly.
Sullivan et al. also created new stories in which the second-order belief was
entertained in the context of deception. The use of this specific context was justi-
fied by some studies showing that children understand (first-order) false beliefs
earlier when one of the characters tries to deceive the other (for instance Sullivan
and Winner 1993). This is however a matter of controversy since other studies
seem to indicate that young children do not understand the notion of deception
(for instance Sodian 1991). The new scenario designed by Sullivan et al. is repro-
duced below, as narrated to the subjects.
Tonight it is Peters birthday and Mum is surprising him with a puppy. She has
hidden the puppy in the basement. Peter says, Mum, I really hope you get me a
puppy for my birthday. Remember, Mum wants to surprise Peter with a puppy.
So, instead of telling Peter she got him a puppy, Mum says, Sorry Peter, I did not
get you a puppy for your birthday. I got you a really great toy instead. Now, Peter
says to Mum, Im going outside to play. On his way outside, Peter goes down
to the basement to fetch his football. In the basement, Peter finds the birthday
puppy! Peter says to himself, Wow, Mum didnt get me a toy, she really got me
a puppy for my birthday. Mum does not see Peter go down to the basement and
find the birthday puppy. Now, the telephone rings, ding-a-ling! Peters grand-
mother calls to find out what time the birthday party is. Grandma asks Mum on
the phone, Does Peter know what you really got him for his birthday?
The presentation of the story is regularly interrupted in order to ask children a

number of control questions, aiming to check that they understood the story up
to that point and to correct them in case of misunderstanding. After hearing the
story, children are asked a question about one characters second-order beliefs (1),
as well as a justification question (2).
1. What does Mum say to Grandma?
2. Why does Mum say that?
Before hearing these questions, children are given a memory aid to remind them
that the mother does not know that Peter has seen his gift. The correct answer to
the first question is no, because Peters mother does not know that he has seen his
gift. After that, children are told that the grandmother asks Peters mother what
Peter thinks he will get for his birthday and children are asked the same questions,
bearing this time on the mothers second-order beliefs. In this case, the correct
answer is a toy.
Results obtained by Sullivan et al. indicate that under the simplified conditions
of their test, 71% of pre-school children, aged 4;8 on average, and 95% of children
in kindergarten aged 6;0 on average were able to reason about second-order beliefs,
as indicated by their ability to correctly answer one false belief question and one
justification question out of the two trials. However, only 43% of the pre-school
children gave the correct answers in both the trials, and also provided correct jus-
tification for their answers. Moreover, the authors have not compared childrens
performance with stories that only changed one parameter with respect to Perner
and Wimmers story. It is therefore not possible to identify, among all their modifi-
cations, those that were really effective in improving childrens success.
The latter question found a partial answer in another study by Coull et al.
(2006). These authors elaborated a new version of the test, containing an even
more simplified scenario than the one by Sullivan et al., summarized below.
It is Pauls birthday. Paul and Sally are in his play room. He is showing Sally his
favorite new present a robot. Paul puts the robot back in the box with the lid
on and then has to go outside. While Paul is away, Sally decides to play a trick
on Paul and move the robot from its box and hide it away in the cupboard.
While Sally is hiding the robot in the cupboard, Paul passes by the window and
sees Sally hiding the robot in the cupboard. But Sally doesnt see Paul watching
her hide the robot in the cupboard. She doesnt see him! Paul then returns to
the toy room.
Children were then asked to answer a question that required the attribution of
second-order beliefs (1) as well as a justification question (2). If children did not
provide a satisfactory answer to question (2), they were also asked a question
explicitly targeting second-order beliefs (3). Three control questions were also
asked (4 to 6).
1. Where does Sally think Paul will look for the robot?
2. Why does Sally think Paul will look for the robot in the _______?
3. Does Sally think that Paul think that his robot is in the box?
4. Does Paul know that the robot is in the cupboard?
5. Does Sally know that Paul saw her hide the robot?
6. Where will Paul look for the robot?
Results from this study indicate that 42% of five- to six-year-old children are able
to pass the test. This result is clearly better than the one obtained by Perner and
Wimmer, for whom the rate of success was only 12%, when no reminder was in-
cluded and the false belief questions were delayed until the end, as is the case in
Coull et al.s experiment. On the other hand, it is worse than the result obtained
by Sullivan et al., according to their own criteria. If a more strict definition of suc-
cess is retained for example a correct answer to the two forced-choice questions
and to the justification questions results from both studies become comparable.
Moreover, the small difference remaining between the studies could be explained
by the fact that Coull et al. did not provide reminders or corrective feedback on
control questions.
Another explanation explored by Coull et al. is that, in Sullivan et al.s study,
children were using the question about the characters ignorance in order to an-
swer the question about false beliefs. Indeed, the first question enables children
to verbalize explicitly what a character knows or ignores. A study by Hogrefe et
al. (1986) showed that children are able to reason about second-order knowl-
edge about two years before they can reason about second-order beliefs. Children
could then use this information in order to reason about the same characters be-
liefs. This idea had already been suggested by Karmiloff-Smith et al. (1995), who
had applied Sullivan et al.s test to subjects suffering from Williams syndrome38. In
a second experiment, Coull et al. confirmed that the addition of a question target-
ing the ignorance of a character improved results for their scenario as well.
To conclude, it seems clear that the test devised by Perner and Wimmer is
at the upper limit of the scale of complexity for second-order false belief tasks,
38. Williams syndrome is a genetic disorder characterized by a marked impairment in cogni-

tion but with relatively intact linguistic and social skills. In many respects, children suffering
from this syndrome are the exact opposite of autistic children.
because of the significant number of entities it involves (characters and places).

From the point of view of complexity, the story proposed by Coull et al. seems to
be the best one, because it provides an optimal reduction of processing difficul-
ties. As for the kinds of questions asked, it does not seem advisable to add a ques-
tion about a characters ignorance, since the possibility exists that this question
may provide clues helping children to reason about false beliefs, even when they
are not yet able to do so without them.
7.4 Design of an experiment on the acquisition of puisque
The remainder of this chapter presents an original experiment which I performed

to assess the relationship between the acquisition of ironic uses of the connective
puisque and the development of second-order theory of mind abilities.
7.4.1 Subjects
Three groups of subjects took part in the experiment. One group included 15 chil-
dren aged 6;9 on average (ranging from 6;4 to 7;3) and a second group included
15 children aged 7;10 on average (7;4 to 8;2). All the children were recruited from
primary schools (first and second grades) in the Geneva region in Switzerland. A
third control group consisted in 30 students of a mean age of 22 years (ranging
from 18 to 34) attending first year classes at the University of Geneva. All subjects
took part in every experimental condition.
7.4.2 Material
Four experimental conditions were tested, with two different stories each. These
four conditions, as well as the keywords that will be used to refer to them, are
listed below.
1. stories ending with an ironic statement containing puisque (puisque)
2. stories ending with an ironic statement without a connective (irony)
3. stories ending with an ironic statement containing parce que (parce que)
4. stories involving the attribution of second-order beliefs (theory of mind)
Taken together, these four conditions were designed to assess the empirical valid-
ity of the theoretical hypotheses summarized in the introduction to this chapter.
The first hypothesis concerns the existence of a correlation between the acquisi-
tion of ironic uses of puisque and the development of second-order theory of
mind abilities. This hypothesis was assessed by comparing childrens performance

in conditions 1 (puisque) and 4 (theory of mind). The second hypothesis concerns
the role of puisque for the comprehension of irony. In order to assess this hypoth-
esis, condition 1 (puisque) was compared with condition 2 (irony) and condi-
tion 3 (parce que). Condition 3 was used to assess the specific use of puisque in
the communication of irony with respect to other causal connectives. Parce que
was preferred to car for this test both because it has a much higher frequency in
speech and because it is phonologically very similar to puisque.
In order to facilitate comprehension, all stories were accompanied by illustra-
tive pictures, showing snapshots of real characters miming the actions described.
During testing sessions, children heard the experimenter read the scenario while
looking at the pictures. Stories were presented as albums, so that children could
go back to previous pictures to check some elements of the story again if they
wanted to. All stimulus sentences presented at the end of the stories had been
previously recorded in order to ensure a uniform presentation. The sentence con-
taining puisque was pronounced in an ironic tone of voice, while the one contain-
ing parce que was pronounced in a neutral voice. It could be argued that access to
prosodic information gave children additional clues on how to process connec-
tives. However, since the younger children could not read sentences on their own,
this potential bias is intrinsic in the experimental method.
The two stories aiming to test second-order theory of mind abilities (S1, S2)
were adapted from the scenario proposed by Coull et al. presented above. The
two stories testing the comprehension of irony without use of a connective (S3,
S4) were adapted from Happ (1993, 1994). An example of such a story is the
following:
David is helping his mother to make a cake. She leaves him to add the eggs to the
flour and sugar. But silly David doesnt break the eggs first he just puts them in
the bowl, shells and all! What a silly thing to do! When mother comes back and
sees what David has done, she says: What a clever boy you are David!
1. What does Davids mother mean?

2. Does she mean that David is clever or silly?
3. Did David spoil the cake?
The first two questions target the comprehension of irony and come from Happs
study, while the last question (3) is a control question added for the purpose of
the present study.
In order to test the comprehension of ironic uses of puisque and to compare
it with the meaning of parce que in an identical context, four stories (S5, S6, S7,
S8) were produced. Each story ended with a sentence that either contained an
ccurrence of puisque or an occurrence of parce que. In order to eliminate poten-

o
tial bias related to a specific story, the two connectives were randomly used in all
the stories (S5a, S5b, etc). Every subject heard two stories ending with puisque and
two ending with parce que. In order to avoid a potential bias caused by the order
in which the stories were presented, the order of presentation was varied and these
different orders of presentation were equally distributed between the subjects.
Every story involved a character described as having a specific quality, like
being brave or strong. But despite this quality, this character failed to accomplish
a task. A second character, described as lacking this quality, criticized him and
pretended he could do much better. The first character defied him to succeed us-
ing an ironic utterance. One of these stories is reproduced below (translated from
French).
Alice must solve a maths problem. She is very good at maths but this problem is
very hard and she doesnt find the answer. Jane attends the same class as Alice.
She is not as good as Alice at maths but she always wants to appear better than
the others. Jane tells Alice that the problem looks very easy and that she could
find the solution in no time. Alice tells her: Give me the answer CONNECTIVE
you are so intelligent39.
After listening to the story, children were asked the following questions:
1. Does Alice believe that Jane can give her the answer?
2. Why does Alice ask Jane to give her the answer if she does not believe that she
can do it? [asked only if answer to 1 is no]
3. Does Alice believe that Jane is very intelligent?
4. Does Jane believe that she is very intelligent?
5. Does Jane really know the answer to the maths problem?
The first two questions target the comprehension of the ironic meaning of puisque
and answering them correctly should require second-order theory of mind abili-
ties. The first question is a forced-choice comprehension question while the sec-
ond question is a justification question, asked in order to ensure that the answer
to question 1 was not due to chance. Questions 3 and 4 target the comprehension
of first-order beliefs of both characters. Lastly, question 5 is a control question
that does not require theory of mind abilities.
Given that the last sentence of the stories ending with parce que and puisque
is ironic, it would have been possible to use them as well for the condition testing
39. In French, the original stimulus sentence was: Alors cest toi qui me donnes la solution,
puisque/parce que tu es la plus intelligente.
irony without a connective, by presenting the stimulus sentence with the connec-
tive removed. However, this solution was rejected on the grounds that the exces-
sive repetition of variations on the same scenario can lead to learning effects, even
in the absence of corrective feedback. Moreover, the stories designed by Happ
have already been used in relation to childrens developing theory of mind abili-
ties. In consequence, their reliability is ascertained.
7.4.3 Procedure
The children were tested individually at their school. The sessions started with a
warm-up, to ensure that they were ready to take part in the experiment. The task
was introduced in the following manner. I am going to tell you stories. Listen care-
fully, because you will have to help me to answer questions at the end of every story.
No time constraint was imposed, but all the children completed the task (8 stories
followed by 3 to 6 questions each) in less than a half an hour.
For all the children, the stories were read aloud by the experimenter but chil-
dren were allowed to go back to previous pictures if they wanted to. This flexibility
was allowed in order to reduce the influence of memory on the childrens per-
formance. The experimenter never gave corrective feedback but always provided
positive reinforcement. For reasons of simplicity, the group of adults read all the
stories as well as the list of questions individually. In their case, the experiment
did not include visual support or spoken stimuli, because it was assumed that
such clues would not be necessary for them to pass the test. In this group, the task
was completed in about 15 minutes. Every subject in the three groups heard or
read the stories in a randomized order, but two stories testing the same experi-
mental condition were never presented in a row.
For every question, the answer was coded in a binary way: correct or incor-
rect. In the case of justification questions, the following criteria were used to judge
if the answer was correct or not. For the theory of mind condition, the justification
was accepted only if it provided a correct explanation of events, given in terms of
mental states. In the parce que, puisque and irony conditions, the justification was
considered to be correct if the answer made explicit the dissociation between the
speakers belief and his utterance.
From a qualitative point of view, the question is how many correct answers
are necessary for a subject to be considered as having passed the test for a par-
ticular condition. Every condition was assessed using two stories, each containing
one forced-choice and one justification question. Therefore, the scores obtained
could vary between 0 to 4 correct answers. If all of the questions had been yes/no
questions, the number of answers would have been insufficient to eliminate the
probability that subjects provided correct answers by chance. However, two of the
four questions were justification questions. Whilst the probability of giving the
right answer by chance is 50% for yes/no questions, the probability of providing
the correct justification by chance is very low. In consequence, the test for a given
condition was considered to be passed if a subject gave at least three correct an-
swers out of four, that is at least one correct justification.
7.5 Results
All stories appeared to be well understood by the subjects, who performed almost
perfectly in response to the control questions in all conditions. Even the young-
er children never got an average success rate under 90%. In addition to control
questions, all conditions except for the irony condition contained two questions
targeting first-order theory of mind abilities (questions 3 and 4 in the parce que/
puisque conditions and 4 and 5 in the theory of mind condition). The percentage
of children who got a maximum of correct answers (4 out of 4) per condition is
summarized in Table 4.
Table 4. Correct answers (%) to questions targeting first-order theory of mind abilities
Parce que Puisque Theory of mind
Six-year-olds 57 73 100
Seven-year-olds 73 90 100
As the above table indicates, childrens performance was highest in the theory
of mind condition, probably because in this condition, the question contained
the verb know rather than think or believe. As discussed above and in Chapter 4,
knowledge is more accessible for children than beliefs. The lower results obtained
for stories containing the connective puisque do not mean that one quarter of the
six-year-old children would fail first-order theory of mind tests. In these stories,
understanding the characters first-order beliefs was strongly dependent on the
ability to recognize their communicative intentions as well, which requires more
complex mentalizing abilities than those assessed in classical versions of the task.
The even lower results observed in the parce que stories probably come from the
additional difficulty to repair the inconsistency provoked by the incorrect use of
this connective in an ironic context.
Every test also contained two questions aiming to evaluate either advanced
theory of mind abilities, or irony without a connective, or with puisque or with
parce que. The average number of correct answers per task and per age group is
given in Table 5. The score was computed on the basis of the four questions asked
in connection with every condition, which again included two forced-choice
questions and two justification questions with the total score varying between 0
and 4 points.
Table 5. Average score per condition and per age group

2nd order
Puisque Parce que Irony
theory of mind
Six-year-olds 1.47 2.26 1.53 1.63
Seven-year-olds 3.4 2.66 2.4 2.6
Adults 3.85 3.95 3.88 3.96
From a qualitative perspective, a subject was considered to have passed the test
when the score was at least 3 (see Section 7.4.3 above). Following this criterion,
the rate of success per task and per age group is shown in Table 6.
Table 6. Rate of success (in percentage of subjects per group) per condition
2nd order
Puisque Parce que Irony
theory ofmind
Six year-olds 20 27 7 33
Seven year-olds 73 53 53 40
Adults 90 97 93 97
Six-year-old children get relatively homogeneous results, between around 20% and
30%, except for the parce que condition, in which their score is only 7%. The group
of seven-year-old children shows a fairly homogenous range of scores between
around 40% and 50%, with the exception of the theory of mind condition, where it
is much higher, around 70%. Lastly, the group of adults gets almost maximal scores
for all conditions, and no test is passed by less than 90% of the subjects.
The statistical significance of the differences observed between groups was
assessed using Students t-test. With this test, a difference can be considered to be
significant if the estimated probability p of the null hypothesis is less than 0.05.
The results obtained with this test for each task are summarized in Table 7. Statis-
tically significant differences at the 95% level are indicated in bold.
Table 7. Statistical significance of differences observed between groups (student t-test)

Theory of mind Puisque Parce que Irony
6 y.-olds vs. 7 y.-olds 0.0002 0.35 0.09 0.05
7 y.-olds vs. adults 0.04 0.0002 0.0007 0.00000001
These results indicate that the seven-year-old children only obtain significantly
better results than six-year-old children in the theory of mind condition, and they
get results significantly worse than the adults in all the conditions. Moreover, this
difference is very significant, except for the theory of mind task, where the prob-
ability of an absence of difference almost reaches the threshold of 0.05.
The existence of correlations between the ability to pass the tests in one con-
dition with respect to the others was also assessed statistically. The measure used
was Pearsons R, which provides values ranging from 1 to +1. A value of +1 indi-
cates the presence of a perfect positive correlation, while a value of 1 indicates a
perfect negative correlation and 0 indicates the absence of any correlation. In oth-
er words, R measures the significance of a correlation: absolute values lower than
0.1 are considered to indicate a weak correlation, those lower than 0.3 a moderate
correlation and those around 0.5 or more a strong correlation (Field 2000:111).
Correlations measured for each pair of tasks are listed in Table 840.
Table 8. Correlation between pairs of conditions per age group (R)

Theory of mind Theory of mind Irony vs. Puisque vs.
vs.Puisque vs.Irony Puisque Parce Que
six year-olds 0.08 0.04 0.13 0.34
seven year-olds 0.33 0.66 0.24 0.91
The correlations indicate that for seven-year-old children, success at the theory of
mind and irony conditions is strongly correlated, and the parce que and puisque
conditions are even more strongly correlated. Moreover, the puisque condition is
moderately correlated with both the theory of mind and the irony conditions. On
the other hand, no positive correlation was found for the group of six-year-old
children.
7.6 Discussion
7.6.1 Comparison with previous studies
Among the four experimental conditions tested in the experiment reported here,
only two (theory of mind and irony) can be compared with previous studies, the
other two being completely novel. The age of acquisition for both abilities derived
40. This measure was computed independently for both groups of children. No measure was
computed for the adults because they acheived almost maximal results and the absence of vari-
ance makes the test irrelevant.
from previous studies was indicated above in Sections 7.2 and 7.3. A compari-
son of these results with the ones found here indicates that the rate of success at
second-order theory of mind tests for six-year-old children in this study is very
low (20%), even compared with the Perner and Wimmer study, which situated
the age of acquisition at a later age than subsequent studies. On the other hand,
the rate of success is closer to previous results for seven-year-old children (73%).
This difference can be explained at least partially by the way scores were com-
puted in this study as well as the conditions in which the tests were administered.
In this study, children were considered to have passed a test only if they gave at
least three correct answers out of four, that is at least one correct justification. In
the case of other second-order theory of mind tests, the rate of success was often
computed on the basis of more indulgent criteria, for instance in the study by
Sullivan et al. (1994). Moreover, contrary to Sullivan et al., no corrective feedback
and no memory aids were provided in this study. These methodological differ-
ences explain, at least in part, the differences in the scores obtained. It is also
worth pointing out that in the less favorable conditions of their experiments, that
is, when children were not given memory aids and when the test question was not
asked immediately after the discovery of the false belief, six-year-old children in
Perner and Wimmers study got a score of 12%, a performance even worse than
the one obtained in this study.
In the case of irony, the higher scores obtained in this study are still low in
comparison of with those found in the literature. Indeed, less than half of the chil-
dren pass the test, even in the older group. But then again, the measure applied
here is also more demanding than in many other studies, since the test included
open questions and required the children to provide a metalinguistic judgment.
Interestingly however, the questions that were most problematic for the children
were forced-choice questions. Even when they were able to provide a correct jus-
tification, many of them were still unable to move away from the literal meaning
of the words used in the stimulus. In consequence, many of them, especially in
the six-year-old group (73%), chose the word that was used in the stimulus (for
instance clever rather than stupid) even if this answer was incompatible with the
justification they had just given. This difficulty is probably related to the inability
to ignore linguistic information, even when it is not coherent with the contextual
information for a given utterance. It will be shown in the next section that chil-
dren encountered similar difficulties with the connective parce que.
To conclude, when the specific characteristics of this study are taken into ac-
count, the scores obtained in this experiment are largely compatible with results
found in the literature, in those cases where the methodology used is comparable.
Therefore, the results can be used as valid references to be compared with scores
obtained in the novel parce que and puisque conditions.
7.6.2 Puisque versus parce que
The experiment described in this chapter also aimed to measure the exact role
of puisque with respect to parce que in the communication of irony, a compari-
son which has never been attempted from an empirical perspective before. The
use of either puisque or parce que only had a significant effect on comprehen-
sion for the six-year-olds. These subjects had an average rate of success of 27%
for the puisque condition, against 7% only for the parce que condition, and this
difference was found to be statistically significant (p < 0.05). On the other hand,
for the group of seven-year-old children, success rates for puisque and parce que
are identical (53%). Similarly, for the group of adults, success rates for parce
que are only slightly inferior to those obtained with puisque (93% and 97% re-
spectively). This difference can be explained in the following way. In the parce
que condition, subjects are confronted with contradictory information. On one
hand, the context encourages them to reach an ironic interpretation. On the
other hand, the presence of parce que and the natural prosody associated with
this connective indicate a high degree of speaker endorsement. The question is
which of these contradictory indicators are those prevailing when processing
the utterance.
From the age of seven, it seems that contextual information becomes more
important than the linguistic information carried by the connective and its re-
lated prosody. This hierarchy is likely to enable subjects to optimize the com-
munication process. Indeed, the linguistic code can be transmitted in a deficient
manner (as in the case of a slip of the tongue) or distorted during transmission
(for example by noise). In these situations, the speaker must be able to repair
these deficiencies by interpreting the utterance in a way that is optimally rel-
evant to him, depending on the information at his disposal (see Chapter 1). It is
now a well-documented phenomenon in pragmatics that the meaning of words
communicated in an utterance often differs from their linguistically-encoded
meaning (see for instance Wilson (2003) for a discussion). As they grow older,
children become able to use the contextual information at their disposal in or-
der to modulate the information encoded in words, using pragmatic processes.
In the case of the experiment described here, even if they already master the
causal meaning of parce que as well as its conditions of use, seven-year-old chil-
dren are able to modulate this meaning to reach an interpretation which makes
sense in context.
It is worth pointing out that, in this experiment, the role of the connective
itself cannot be distinguished from the role of prosody. In order to evaluate the
role of these two factors, it is necessary to add another experimental condition
in which parce que would be pronounced with an ironic rather than a neutral
intonation. However, it seems very difficult to separate the use of a connective

from its prosody, in so far as prosodic information is always part of the inter-
pretation process in speech. In consequence, a use of parce que with an ironic
prosody would result in a rather unnatural utterance, and is likely to appear
inappropriate.
7.6.3 Correlations between puisque and second-order theory of mind
One of the hypotheses made in Chapter 5 was that ironic uses of puisque re-
quired second-order theory of mind abilities. In this experiment, a moderate
correlation was observed between the two conditions for seven-year-old chil-
dren but no correlation was found for six-year-old children (see Table 6). The
result obtained with seven-year-old children confirms to a large extent the hy-
pothesis that the acquisition of these two cognitive abilities is correlated. The
absence of correlation for six-year-old children is simply due to the fact that,
in their case, neither of the two abilities were acquired yet. In fact, only 20% of
them passed the theory of mind condition and 27% passed the puisque condi-
tion. In consequence, the absence of correlation as measured by the R coef-
ficient is largely to be expected, since the childrens answer can be attributed to
chance in both cases.
This experiment moreover confirmed the correlation already observed in the
literature between irony and second-order theory of mind abilities. A strong cor-
relation was observed between these two tasks for seven-year-old children.
7.6.4 The role of puisque for the comprehension of irony
Another hypothesis assessed in this experiment is the facilitating role of puisque

for the communication of irony. The reasoning behind this hypothesis was that
the presence of a connective, by making discourse relations explicit, facilitated
their processing. Given the frequent association between uses of puisque and
ironic meaning, it was predicted that the presence of puisque in an utterance
would facilitate access to the speakers ironic meaning. This hypothesis remains
plausible in light of the empirical data presented in this chapter. However, the
exact nature of this role has not been clearly established. In the group of six-year-
old children, the rate of success was slightly inferior in the puisque condition
compared to the irony condition (27% against 33%). However, this difference
was not statistically significant (p > 0.05). It is however possible that the low
score obtained by children on the puisque condition is partly due to the pres-
ence of the parce que condition. About half of the children heard their first story
with parce que in the stimulus sentence. In consequence, it is possible that they
gave the wrong answer to the following stories with puisque by analogy with
their answers to the previous stories. Indeed, when the children were divided
into two subgroups depending on which connective they heard first, the differ-
ence between their scores was found to be statistically significant (p=0.02). In
other words, children who heard a story containing parce que before hearing
a story with puisque scored significantly worse than the others on the puisque
condition. Seven-year-old children, who did not suffer from a parasitic effect
related to parce que, got better results in the puisque condition compared to the
irony condition (53% against 40%), however, this difference was not statistically
significant at the 95% level.
Finally, the possibility that the differences observed were due to the intrinsic
difficulty of the stories cannot be excluded in light of this data. In order to exclude
this alternative explanation, it would be necessary to use identical stories and test
questions in the conditions testing irony with and without puisque.
7.6.5 Developmental effect
This experiment indicated the presence of different developmental effects in

the conditions. Seven-year-old children got significantly better scores than six-
year-old children in the theory of mind condition. However, results from the two
groups were not significantly different for the other three conditions, involving
the comprehension of irony. This result could be explained by the fact that the
theory of mind condition was less demanding than the others from a linguistic
point of view. In order to pass the test, children only had to indicate a specific
location in an image. More specifically, this difference could also reflect a funda-
mental property of verbal communication, involved in the processing of irony. In
order to understand irony, children do not only have to be able to attribute com-
plex mental states to a speaker, but also to reason inferentially on the basis of this
information in order to identify his communicative intention. It is possible that
this second processing step that is not required to pass theory of mind tests is
not yet acquired at the age of seven.
From a developmental point of view, it is also worth noting that seven-year-
old children do not get results similar to those of the adult control group in any
of the linguistic conditions. In consequence, it is necessary to conduct a similar
experiment with older children, in order to determine when they reach adult-like
competencies for these tasks.
7.7 Summary
This chapter was dedicated to an empirical investigation of the acquisition of the

connective puisque. Using the available corpus data from the CHILDES database,
I concluded that children do not acquire this connective before the age of four.
This result provides a first confirmation that no use of puisque is acquired before
children develop first-order theory of mind abilities. However, because of lack of
corpus data, the emergence of the first correct uses of puisque could not be firmly
established by this study.
The main part of the chapter was dedicated to a controlled experiment focus-
ing on the correlation between the comprehension of ironic uses of puisque and
the development of second-order theory of mind abilities. In this respect, the
theoretical hypotheses detailed in Chapter 5 and summarized at the beginning of
this chapter were to a large extent confirmed. It was notably shown that by the age
of seven, the ability to understand an ironic utterance with puisque was positively
correlated with the ability to pass second-order theory of mind tests. Another
important result was that among seven-year-olds, the comprehension of irony
was superior when puisque was included in the stimulus sentence, compared to a
stimulus sentence without a connective. However, this difference was not found
to be statistically-significant. Some suggestions were also made in order to devise
tests to assess the role of puisque further.
This study also revealed the presence of a developmental effect for all tested
conditions. However, results obtained in this study do not provide data to evalu-
ate precisely when these abilities become adult-like. The answer to this question
requires the inclusion of older children in a future experiment.
Conclusion
In this book, I first explored the relations between the cognitive notion of theory
of mind and current pragmatic theories (Chapter 1). I have argued that the ability
to attribute mental states to oneself and to others is a key component of verbal
communication in all inferential models of communication, which can be traced
back to the work of Paul Grice (1957, 1989). However, Grices theory being phil-
osophical rather than psychological in nature, I stressed that his model cannot
realistically account for the way speakers actually deal with mental states in the
course of verbal communication. I argued that a theoretically compatible inter-
face between verbal communication and theory of mind required both a refine-
ment of the notion of theory of mind from a modular perspective (Baron-Cohen
1995; Leslie 1994) and a revised Gricean model of communication along the lines
proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986).
A review of existing data on the acquisition of language, pragmatic abilities
and theory of mind lead to the conclusion that these cognitive abilities are con-
currently acquired during the childs first years of life (Chapter 2). This influence
is therefore bidirectional but not constant throughout development. At the onset
of acquisition, it is childrens developing theory of mind that enables them to start
lexical acquisition around the age of one. Later on, this influence seems to reverse
and the acquisition of language gives children a tool for speaking and reasoning
about other peoples mental states.
In cognitive psychology, one of the earliest applications of the notion of the-
ory of mind has been to explain the inability of autistic subjects to communicate,
because of what Baron-Cohen calls their mindblindness (Baron-Cohen 1995).
A thorough review of the most recent findings in communication and autism
revealed how the notion of theory of mind can serve as an explanation for many
of these difficulties (Chapter 3). In addition to mental state attribution, another
key component of verbal communication is the integration of context. Therefore,
I argued that the hypothesis of a deficient theory of mind was not sufficient to
account for all communication problems encountered by autistic subjects, be-
cause the necessity of integrating contextual information cannot be accounted for
in terms of theory of mind, but rather by a problem of weak central coherence.
Iargued that taken together, the theory of mind and weak central coherence hy-
potheses could account for all the communication deficits observed in autism.
In the second part of the book, I discussed the possibility that childrens abil-
ity to use some lexical items, morphology or grammatical structures can be used
as a window to look into their developing theory of mind abilities (Chapter 4).
A detailed review of existing work on the acquisition of these linguistic items
revealed that children typically start to use them around the age of three in spon-
taneous production, but only pass comprehension tests targeting them between
the age of four or five. Several explanations were provided to account for the gap
between production and comprehension and to account for the early production
of these items with respect to the age of success at standard theory of mind tests
like the false belief task.
In Chapter 5, I focused more specifically on the functional category of dis-
course connectives and showed that these lexical items were related to theory
of mind abilities in several ways. First, a general relationship between theory of
mind and discourse connectives is found in the nature of the segments linked
by connectives, using the notion of domains of use coined by Sweetser (1990).
More specifically, I developed several arguments showing that using connectives
in the epistemic domain required theory of mind abilities. This analysis lead to
the formulation of precise hypotheses regarding the order of acquisition for the
various domains of use, both by normally developing and autistic children. The
second point of convergence between discourse connectives and theory of mind
is related to the procedural meaning of some specific connectives. As an illustra-
tion of this phenomenon, I focused on the French connective puisque. A new
analysis of this connective revealed that all of its uses could be accounted for in a
unified way using the notion of echoic use proposed by Sperber & Wilson (1986).
More specifically, I argued that the cause segment (following the connective) al-
ways contained the metarepresentation of an echoic thought or utterance, used to
convey the speakers own attitude. Because of this additional constraint, puisque
minimally required first-order theory of mind abilities and even second-order
theory of mind abilities when used to convey ironic meaning.
The last part of the book presented two original empirical studies on the ac-
quisition of French discourse connectives. The study in Chapter 6 consisted in an
empirical validation of the hypotheses regarding the acquisition of domains of use
and their relations with theory of mind development. The main result emerging
from this study for the interface between language and theory of mind is that nor-
mally developing children start producing epistemic uses later than the other uses
of this connective, at around the age of three. Moreover, autistic children seem to
be specifically impaired in the use of connectives in the epistemic domain.
Chapter 7 offered a second empirical validation of the link between the ac-
quisition of connectives and theory of mind, focusing on the French causal con-
nective puisque. A corpus study and a controlled experiment confirmed that this
Conclusion 175
c onnective is acquired hand in hand with childrens first- and second-order theory
of mind abilities. The production of puisque was first investigated using the previ-
ous corpora, with the result that no correct occurrence of puisque was produced
by the children until they reached the age of four. This provided a preliminary
confirmation that puisque is acquired later than parce que. The relationship be-
tween the acquisition of ironic uses of puisque and second-order theory of mind
abilities was assessed in a comprehension experiment. Results indicated that by
the age of seven, the ability to understand the ironic meaning conveyed by the
use of puisque was correlated across subjects with the ability to pass second-order
theory of mind tests.
This book therefore made a case for the relation between lexical pragmatics
and theory of mind and also opened many new directions of study to be explored
in future work. In Chapter 2, I discussed the role of theory of mind for lexical
acquisition. However, current work on this topic focuses almost exclusively on
the acquisition of names for concrete objects. This book constitutes an attempt to
enlarge this perspective by extending it to the category of discourse connectives,
but it is crucial that future work explore the possible role of theory of mind abili-
ties in the acquisition of other lexical categories like verbs or adjectives, and even
for other closed-class items, in order to achieve a complete picture of the role of
mental state attribution for lexical development.
In this book, the relationship between theory of mind abilities and connectives
was studied through the lens of their acquisition in a single language (French).
A second target for future investigation is therefore to extend this study to the
acquisition of connectives and their relations to childrens developing theory of
mind abilities in other languages, especially those belonging to different language
families and spoken in different cultures. For example, languages that use other
complementation strategies than English or French to communicate mental states
(some of them are described in Dixon and Aikhenvald 2006) would be particu-
larly interesting for investigating the relationship between language and theory
of mind. Studying the acquisition of connectives in a sample of diverse languages
will provide the opportunity to check the universal influence of theory of mind
abilities on their acquisition with respect to other environmental factors.
The results of the experiment on the acquisition of puisque presented in Chap-
ter 7 indicated that children become progressively able to modulate the meaning
linguistically encoded in words in order to reach a relevant interpretation in con-
text. Notably, results from the comprehension experiment revealed that a major-
ity of seven-year-old children were even able to infer an ironic meaning from an
utterance containing parce que, although this connective is not normally used in
such contexts. More generally, it is now a well-known fact in lexical pragmatics that
the meaning of all words is often adjusted in context, using pragmatic processes
of narrowing or broadening. Although the processes underlying the treatment

of metaphor or irony have been the subject of many empirical investigations in
acquisition studies, the development of other lexical pragmatic processes involv-
ing narrowing or broadening of a linguistically-encoded concept (described for
instance in Wilson and Carston 2007) remains to be explored. Such a study would
certainly produce important results for experimental pragmatics in the future.
In sum, this book has presented new insights into two of the most topical is-
sues in pragmatics today: the role of theory of mind for verbal communication
and the nature of the functional category of discourse connectives. It has also
stressed the importance of adopting an empirical approach in order to shed new
light on classical questions in pragmatics.
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Index
A Deaf children 43, 46 Intentionality Detector

Advanced false-belief task Dennett 7 (Baron-Cohen) 11, 31, 63
67, 71, 153154 Deontic modality 77 Irony 41, 66, 69, 119, 152157,
Perner & Wimmer 35, Diessel 93, 113, 139, 141 170171
157158 Ducrot 116117
Sullivan et al. 158159 J
Coull et al. 159161 E Joint attention 65
Agrammatic aphasia 47 Echoic language use Joliffe & Baron-Cohen 67
Aikhenvald 74 75, 117119, 153 Junn Quechua 44
Aksu-Ko 89 Echolalia 69
Appearance-reality task 34 Elicitation task 126, 127128 K
Article 28, 82 Epistemic modality 78, 86 Kanner 54
Augmented code model 16 Epistemic vigilance 37 Keenan & Quigley 153
Explicature 104105, 139
B Eye-Direction-Detector L
Baldwin 32 (Baron-Cohen) 11, 31, 63 Lambda-l Group 108, 113117
Baka tribe 44 Language delay 56
Baron-Cohen 8, 11, 63, 64, 111 F Lexical acquisition 29, 48, 83, 141
Bartsch & Wellman 84 False naming paradigm 111 in autism 58, 65
Bloom 22, 28, 82 Flavell 34 in Asperger syndrome 59
Bloom & German 8, 140 Fodor 22 Lexical ambiguity 68, 79, 130
Frith 36, 54, 56, 58, 59, 61, Linguistic relativism 80, 91
C 66, 145
Cautious optimism (Sperber) M
21, 152 G Mascaro & Sperber 37, 121
Central coherence 66 Gordon 11 Maxim of conversation 19, 42, 71
Cherokee 74 Gibbs 106107 Meltzoff 33
CHILDES database 83, 85, 131, Grice 16, 106 Meta-analysis of false belief 9
145, 148 Metaphor 41, 62, 66, 69, 112, 154
Choi 89 H Metarepresentation 12
Clark 28, 82, 140 Happ 9, 39, 41, 57, 62, 66, 67, Of mental states 64, 80, 103,
Complement clauses 45, 77, 68, 154, 156, 162 111, 136
7980, 91 Hearsay 75, 81, 88, 119 Of speech acts 64, 104, 111,
Conditional 81 Hirsch-Pasek & Golinkoff 29 136
Confidence interval 135 Hughes et al. 38 Mirror neurons 12
Conversational skills 40 Modular account of theory
in autism 61, 65 I of mind 11, 36, 85
Coull et al. 159161, 162 Implicated premise 106 Moeschler 113, 114
Implicature 17, 106, 139
D Indirect speech act 62, 70, 71 N
De Villiers 80, 90, 91, 9293 Inference 68, 74, 75, 76, 88, Naive optimism (Sperber) 20
De Villiers & Pyers 45, 91, 111 98, 130 Ninio & Snow 40
Non-natural meaning (Grice) R Sweetser 77, 81, 9899, 100

16 Reading time 107 Syntactic ambiguity 68
Number 82 Relative clause 8081, 9192 Syntax (acquisition of) 29, 80,
Relevance theory 1921, 67, 104, 83, 84, 9194
O 118, 119 in autism 59, 91
Onishi & Baillargeon 31, 36 Right temporo-parietal junction
14 T
P Root modality 77, 86 Tariana 74, 88
Papafragou 74, 75, 77, 78, 86, Roulet 100101, 105, 114 Theory-of-Mind-Mechanism
8990 (Baron-Cohen) 12
Parental input 84, 110, 125, S Theory theory account of theory
141143, 151 Sally-Anne task 8 of mind 10, 85
Pearsons R 167 Scope effect 108 Traxler 107110
Perner 14, 33 Secondary pragmatic process Twin studies 38, 54
Perner & Ruffman 31 106107
Perner & Wimmer 157, 168 Shared-Attention Mechanism U
Peterson & Slaughter 38, 141 (Baron-Cohen) 11, 32, 63 Unexpected content task 9
Phonological development 58 Shatz 44, 83 Unexpected transfer task 7
Politeness 40 Simulation account of theory Usage-based theories 141
in autism 61, 65 of mind 11
Polyphony 101 Smarties task 9 V
Pretense 11, 33 Sophisticated understanding Vinden 44
Primary pragmatic process (Sperber) 21, 153 Vocabulary spurt 32
106107 Source of belief 34, 7477,
Promise 35 8890 W
Prosody 65, 154, 170 Specific language impairment Wellman 9
(SLI) 57, 60, 145 Williams syndrome 18
Q Sperber 20, 37, 103, 138, 152153 Wilson 18, 41, 119, 120, 152, 169
Qualitative analysis 133, 149 Sperber & Wilson 19, 22, 141, Wimmer & Perner 7
Quantitative analysis 132, 149 152 Winner 71, 152156
Subjectivity 102
Sullivan et al. 158159, 168
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192 Filipi, Anna: Toddler and Parent Interaction. The organisation of gaze, pointing and vocalisation. 2009.
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Lexical Pragmatics and Theory of Mind

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS)

Editor Associate Editor

John Benjamins Publishing Company

American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

2010 John Benjamins B.V.

2.3 Interdependence of language and theory of mind 39

(in the lexicon or in verbal morphology), is seen as an indicator of the universal

The concept of theory of mind in pragmatics

1.1 Defining theory of mind

1.1.1 The false belief task

To test the possession of adult-like mindreading abilities, psychologists have de-

Then the child is asked the following questions:

1. Where will Maxi look for the chocolate?

1.1.2 Problems and controversies related to the false belief task

1.1.3 Acquired concept or innate mental module?

A completely different explanation has been proposed by Gordon (1986) who

1.1.4 Arguments from the neuroscience of theory of mind

The existence of a modular system specifically dedicated to the processing of

3. no difference among stories not involving mental states that do or do not

1.2 Theory of mind and theories of verbal communication

1.2.1 The code model of communication

1.2.2 Grices model of communication

theory of communication implies that only speakers able to manipulate metarep-

1.2.3 Relevance theory

(4) Mary thinks that we ran out of bread.

1.2.4 A specialized sub-module of theory of mind dedicated

in accessing contextual information and enriching the linguistic meaning at the

The co-acquisition of language

2.1 The main stages of language acquisition

2.2 The development of theory of mind abilities

In the preceding chapter, I argued in favor of a modular approach to theory of

2.2.1 The main stages of theory of mind development

2.2.1.1 Very young children (018 months)

2.2.1.3 From 18 months to 3 years

2.2.1.4 From 3 to 6 years

However, there is a crucial distinction to be made between the ability to un-

2.2.1.5 After 6 years

2.2.2 What do the developmental stages of theory of mind tell us

is the ability [to] deploy conscious metacognitive inferences or to articulate a

2.2.3 Individual differences in theory of mind development

2.3 Interdependence of language and theory of mind

2.3.1 Pragmatic competence: Between language and theory of mind

In the developmental literature, the term pragmatic competence is used to account

predicted by relevance theory but not by traditional Gricean accounts seems to

2.3.2 The role of language in theory of mind development

2.3.2.1 Language as a trigger for theory of mind abilities

2.3.2.2 Are some aspects of language specifically related to theory of mind?

Despite this syntactic similarity, German-speaking children show exactly the

2.3.3 Theory of mind development as a pre-requisite

2.3.4 The development of language and theory of mind:

to produce a limited number of isolated words. It is just as improbable that a

Insights from autism on language

3.1 Autism: A definition

Autism is a developmental disorder affecting boys four times as often as girls,

Since the first descriptions of this pathology produced independently by Leo

3.1.1 The biological basis of autism

The biological basis of autism is now widely recognized, thanks to a growing

. For a presentation of Asperger syndrome, see Section 3.1.2.1.

3.1.2 The autistic spectrum

The diagnosis of autism is particularly difficult to establish, because the clinical

3.1.2.1 Asperger syndrome

3.1.2.2 Semantic-pragmatic disorder

1.2.4 A specialized sub-module of theory of mind dedicated

2.2.2 What do the developmental stages of theory of mind tell us

2.3.3 Theory of mind development as a pre-requisite

2.3.4 The development of language and theory of mind: