Aspectos del procesamiento y de la adquisición de oraciones completivas con verbos de cognición y su relación con el desarrollo del raciocinio sobre falsas creencias

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a study aimed at investigating whether children’s performance on a memory for complements task could predict his/her performance on standard false belief tasks. Five experiments were run. Experiment 1 was an adaptation of the classic memory for complements task in which we analyzed as variables the originally counterbalanced factors (type of verb – say/think – and type of question – short/long). The other four experiments evaluated children’s comprehension of factuality and factivity; the demands of processing a moved versus in situ wh-element; the production of complement clauses; and the ability to reason about a false belief situation. The subjects were 25 Brazilian Portuguese speaking children; aged 2;10 to 3;9 years (mean: 3;6). The results suggest that good performance on memory for complements task is not a sufficient precondition for passing on a false belief task.