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Epistemic modality in French children's discourse: to be sure or not to be sure? Dominique Bassano, Maya Hickmann and Christian Champaud Journal of Child Language / Volume 19 / Issue 02 / June 1992, pp 389 - 413 DOI: 10.1017/S0305000900011466, Published online: 17 February 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0305000900011466 How to cite this article: Dominique Bassano, Maya Hickmann and Christian Champaud (1992). Epistemic modality in French children's discourse: to be sure or not to be sure?. Journal of Child Language, 19, pp 389-413 doi:10.1017/S0305000900011466 Request Permissions : Click here

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J. Child Lang. 19 (1992), 389-413. Printed in Great Britain

Epistemic modality in French children's discourse: to be sure or not to be sure ?* DOMINIQUE BASSANO Laboratoire de Psychologie Experimentale, Paris MAYA HICKMANN Max Planck Insitut fur Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen AND

CHRISTIAN CHAMPAUD Laboratoire de Psychologie Experimentale, Paris (Received 17 September 1990. Revised 22 July 1991)

ABSTRACT

This study focuses on the development of epistemic modality, with particular attention to how French children evaluate the conditions of use for modal expressions marking certainty and uncertainty. Sixty children aged four, six and eight were shown films involving verbal interactions in which a target speaker accused another of having performed a deed. The analysis examine children's responses during a subsequent interview in which they were asked to attribute an epistemic attitude of certainty/uncertainty to the target speaker as a function of three factors: (a) whether he had witnessed the deed; (b) whether his accusation was modalized by the verb croire ('think/believe'); and (c) whether the accusation was true or false. The results show that the fourand six-year-olds attribute certainty more often than the eight-year-olds. This dissymmetry is accompanied by a developmental progression in children's conceptions of these modal categories, which change from a ' realistic' conception (mainly based on truth/falsity) at four years to an increasingly metalinguistic and relativized conception thereafter.

[*] The authors are grateful to the headmistress and teachers of the schools which cooperated in the study: 20 rue Delambre and 80 boulevard du Montparnasse, 75014 Paris. They acknowledge Francoise Roland and Catherine Marlot for technical and stylistic assistance. Address for correspondence: Dominique Bassano, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Laboratoire de Psychologie, 54 boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, France.

389

CHILD LANGUAGE

INTRODUCTION

Natural languages provide speakers with various linguistic means that allow them to indicate their attitudes towards the truth value of propositions. In all languages these devices correspond to the category known as epistemic modality. When reporting events, speakers can either present them as facts by simply asserting propositions or they can use different modal devices which qualify the assertions and mark the speaker's commitment to the content reported. For example, they can say / am sure that P, I think that P, I believe that P, Maybe P, P must be the case, I am not sure that P, I don't think that P, and so on. Speaker's uses of these modal devices, which allow them to indicate some degree of certainty or uncertainty towards the content reported, depend a great deal on the source and strength of their background knowledge concerning the events they talk about. The acquisition of epistemic modality requires children to learn not only which particular devices are available in their language for the marking of modal distinctions, but also the pragmatic conditions under which such devices are used. The present study examines the development of epistemic modality in French, with particular attention to how children evaluate the conditions of use for the modal expressions etre sur (' to be sure') and ne pas etre sur (' not to be sure') when attributing the epistemic states of certainty or uncertainty to speakers, as well as how they relate these expressions to other modal devices, such as croire ('think/believe'). Epistemic modality is a relatively complex category which presents children with subtle markings to acquire. According to Halliday (1970, 1975) it marks 'speakers' comments' about propositions and allows the expression of subjectivity. However, it corresponds more precisely to a particular domain of the speaker's subjectivity, namely cognition, since epistemic modal devices express various subtle cognitive attitudes, states, or processes. These devices can be very diverse within and across languages: they include modal auxiliaries (like English may and must), verbal inflections (like the conditional or evidential), but also main verbs expressing propositional attitudes (like French savoir, croire; English know, think), adverbial phrases, and various other constructions involving personal forms (like I am sure) and impersonal expressions (like it is possible). Modal auxiliaries play an important role in some languages, such as English or German, whereas epistemic modality is largely realized by other means in French. From a developmental point of view, it is still unclear how children manage to acquire and use this set of linguistic devices in order to express such complex distinctions. A large number of naturalistic and experimental studies have dealt with the development of epistemic modality, focusing on children's production and comprehension of two types of devices: modal verbs, mainly auxiliaries, and 'mental terms', such as cognitive verbs.

39°

EPISTEMIC MODALITY IN FRENCH

Longitudinal studies of both types of devices (mostly about English) indicate that epistemic modality develops relatively late in children's spontaneous productions. Stephany (1986) notes that the first epistemically modalized statements (modal auxiliaries such as must and may) have generally been found to occur in the second half of the third year during the development of English, that is about six months later than deontic meanings, and that such epistemically modalized utterances are first extremely rare, until at least the middle of the fourth year. Although other epistemic modal devices have been found earlier in some other languages, it is usually admitted that epistemic meanings are expressed after deontic ones by children acquiring quite different languages. This delay is confirmed by studies about the acquisition of mental verbs. For instance Shatz, Wellman & Silber (1983) showed that the verbs know and think, which were the first and most frequent of all mental verbs used by the child under study, also began to appear in the second half of the third year during the development of English, serving conversational functions and real mental references. The verb believe was also used during the same period, but later and less frequently. No mention is made of the adjective sure. A rather different perspective can be found in experimental approaches, the aim of which is to explore children's difficulties in understanding particular semantic and pragmatic properties of epistemic devices. These studies show that, even when young children use such devices in spontaneous speech, they do not master all the modal distinctions that differentiate them. Thus, when the comprehension of particular properties of these terms is tested, children usually display a complete confusion until four or five years of age, while differentiations are progressively established during school years. The problems raised in such experimental studies involve three main issues. A first issue concerns the comprehension of the presuppositional properties of mental verbs. A large number of developmental studies have investigated the basic contrast between factive verbs such as know (which presuppose the truth of their complement clause) and non-factive ones such as think or be sure (the complement clause of which may be true or false). These studies suggest that children's knowledge about these presuppositional properties of cognitive verbs develops progressively (see for example Harris, 1975; MacNamara, Baker & Olson, 1976; Johnson & Maratsos, 1977; Hopmann & Maratsos, 1978; Hidi & Hildyard, 1979; Scoville & Gordon, 1980; Abbeduto & Rosenberg, 1985). The factive properties of know appear to be well understood by children from about four, with some variations probably due to differences in the experimental methods used across studies. However, the understanding of non-factive properties seems to be somewhat delayed and to develop slowly on a verb-by-verb basis. For example, Abbeduto & Rosenberg (1985) found that four-year-olds recognized the factivity of know, that most of them seemed to be aware of the non-factive

CHILD LANGUAGE

status of think, but that children treated believe as a factive verb up to age seven. More recently several studies have examined a second issue concerning more directly children's understanding of the modal value of epistemic terms, i.e. their understanding of how speakers qualify their assertions as certain (e.g. by means of expressions such as / know, I am sure), uncertain (/ don't know, I am not sure), or as having different 'degrees of certainty' (/ believe, I think, must, may, etc.). Children's understanding of such variations requires that they differentiate basic epistemic attitudes expressed by the various modal devices of the language they are acquiring. A series of studies carried out with French children aged from four to eleven (Bassano, 1982; Bassano & Champaud, 1983; Champaud & Bassano, 1984; Bassano, 1985 a; 19856; Bassano, 1986; Bassano, 1990) investigated the development of the understanding of such basic epistemic attitudes by means of 'speakers' choice' tasks. Children were asked to attribute to speakers utterances involving epistemic modal devices, such as Je sais que P (' I know that P'), Jfe ne sais pas si P (' I don't know if P'), jfe crois que P (' I believe that P'), jfe suis stir que P (' I am sure that P'), jfe ne suis pas stir que P ('I am not sure that P'), etc. In order to do so, children had to select one or several characters among a set of puppets that had different types of background knowledge concerning the denoted event. The results suggest that children's understanding of the various epistemic devices develops as a function of the different ways in which such devices qualify the assertion. Devices that confirm the assertion, namely expressions which indicate a state of certainty, such as jfe sais ('I know') and jfe suis stir ('I am sure'), are correctly understood from four or five years on. In contrast, devices which indicate a questioning of the assertion or a limitation in the speaker's commitment to this assertion, e.g. the various expressions of doubt and conviction such as jfe crois (' I think/believe'), peut-etre (' maybe'), jfe ne suis pas sur (' I am not sure'), turn out to be much more difficult to master. Moreover, they are treated by young children as basic expressions of certainty. For example, je crois is not clearly differentiated iromje sais and not interpreted with a modal value of uncertainty until age seven or even later. Similar confusions occur with peut-etre, while je ne suis pas sur is treated by young children as expressing certainty about a negative event. Discrepancies appear in the process of differentiation between the modal devices of the last groups and devices expressing certainty: for instance peut-etre andje ne suis pas sur are differentiated earlier thanje crois. Such a result may be related to the degree of certainty involved in different modal forms: the higher the degree of certainty, the later the modal form is differentiated from the paradigm of certainty. Similar progressions in children's differentiation of various epistemic terms have been observed in studies carried out with other languages and 392

EPISTEMIC MODALITY IN FRENCH

using quite different tasks, namely ' hidden objects' tasks. For example, Hirst & Weil (1982) examined English-speaking children's appreciation of the relative strength of modal auxiliaries (must, may, contrasted with is) by asking them to find the object denoted in two sentences such as The peanut must be under the box and The peanut is under the cup. The results show that children at first do not differentiate modalized utterances from utterances expressing bare facts and that they differentiate may before must. These results are similar to those obtained by Hoffman (1985) concerning the German modal verbs kb'nnen and miissen (contrasted with sein). Recently, Moore & Davidge (1989), using the same type of task to study the development of mental terms, found an increasing differentiation between know and think from four years on, as well as between sure and think, but no distinction between know and sure. All these results seem to indicate that the meanings of epistemic modal forms are not clearly differentiated until about four years of age and that the first differentiations involve the terms that are the most contrasted with respect to the degree of certainty expressed. A third related issue concerns children's understanding of the pragmatic conditions of use for epistemic modal devices. Indeed, an essential aspect of the acquisition of modal devices is the notion of appropriateness in relation to context. Thus, speakers' uses of these devices necessarily depend on whether they have background knowledge about the events talked about, as well as on the source and strength of this knowledge, e.g. whether they witnessed the events directly versus merely making some inferences about them. Therefore, an implicit question in some of the studies mentioned above is whether children's knowledge of various modal distinctions is somehow related to their understanding of appropriateness conditions in discourse. Thus, it is possible that such pragmatic knowledge is at least a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the development of epistemic modality. This type of question was raised in a somewhat different way by some previous studies using 'hidden objects' tasks in order to explore children's mental term comprehension. Children, who had provided successful or unsuccessful responses in various conditions of knowledge (presence or absence of previous information about the location of an object) were asked to say if they knew, guessed, remembered, etc. the object location. Several studies (Miscione, Marvin, Greenberg & O'Brien, 1978; Wellman & Johnson, 1979) found that four-year-old children interpreted the mental verbs solely on the basis of their present external performance, regardless of their knowledge bases. For example, they judged that they knew if they chose the correct hiding place, and that they guessed if their choice was incorrect, without taking into account the fact that know and guess contrast with respect to previous knowledge. These studies have therefore documented a stage in children's language development (at about age 4) when verbs expressing 393

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epistemic attitudes are interpreted in relation to external observable features, regardless of background knowledge (for further discussion, see also Johnson & Wellman, 1980; Johnson, 1982). This result raises the following central question, which still needs further investigation: on what bases do young children interpret epistemic attitudes - on objective states of affairs, on background knowledge, or on other factors ? The present research addresses this question. It is part of a series of studies concerning the development of epistemic modality in French, with particular attention to children's sensitivity to the pragmatic rules of use for specific modal devices (see also Bassano, Champaud & Hickmann 1988; 1989; Champaud, Bassano & Hickmann in press; Hickmann, Bassano & Champaud 1990; Hickmann, Champaud & Bassano, in press). The aim of this research is to examine systematically the relative impact of several factors that might affect how French children report, use, and talk about devices marking epistemic modality during the course of development. For this purpose, an experiment was designed with the following procedure: children were shown filmed dialogues involving appropriate and inappropriate uses or non-uses of modal devices, and they were then asked to narrate these films and to answer various questions about them. Among these questions, one consisted of asking children whether the main speaker of the film was ' sure' or ' not sure' of the event reported in his utterance. The analyses below focus on how children use the expressions sure and not sure in answer to this question, and on what type of cues they based their response when attributing to speakers the epistemic attitudes of certainty and uncertainty. These analyses have two main aims. The first is to examine the evolution in children's understanding of the two categories of certainty versus uncertainty. Indeed, some of our previous results (Bassano, 1985 a, 19856) suggest that the development of the two notions is not parallel and that the attribution of uncertainty requires more complex cognitive and linguistic abilities. The second aim of the analyses is to specify which properties of the speech situations influence children's responses when they attribute to speakers epistemic attitudes of certainty or uncertainty. We compare the relative impact of the following three factors on whether and why children judge that speakers are 'sure' or 'not sure': (a) the conditions that contribute to their background knowledge, i.e. perceptual evidence or lack of such evidence concerning the described events; (b) the linguistic devices involved in their utterances, i.e. the presence versus absence of a modal device; (c) the real states of affairs, i.e. whether the assertion is consistent with the described events. Age differences were expected on the basis of previous results about mental verb comprehension. For example, the youngest children should be more influenced by real states of affairs, while children should pay more attention to linguistic devices with increasing age. In addition, further qualitative analyses examine the linguistic devices used 394

EPISTEMIC MODALITY IN FRENCH

by children at various ages to qualify their response when attributing certainty and uncertainty and when explaining such epistemic attitudes.

METHOD

Subjects A total of 60 French subjects between 4;o and 9; 5 participated in the study: 20 four- to five-year-olds (range: 4; o to 5 ; 7, median and mean age 4; 11); 20 six- to seven-year-olds (range: 6;o to 7;2, median: 6;6, mean: 6;5); 20 eight- to nine-year-olds (range: 7; 8 to 9; 5, median: 8; 3, mean 8; 5). Apparatus and procedure Children were presented with video films and they were then asked to narrate these films for a naive interlocutor and to answer some systematic questions about them during a subsequent interview. Material. Eight short video films were constructed. Each film showed an interaction among four puppets, two of which were a boy and a girl (the same ones across all films), while the other two were animals that differed across the films. In each film one of the animals performed a target action (e.g. the animals were a monkey and a rabbit, and the monkey knocked a cup over; or they were a cat and a dog and the dog broke a cracker, etc). During a subsequent exchange the boy produced a target utterance in which he attributed the action to one of the two animals; the boy's target utterance was addressed to the girl, who was always absent when the target action occurred and who asked 'what happened?'. These scenarios varied as a function of three main factors that were systematically manipulated: (a) the speaker's perceptual conditions: the boy wither witnessed the action mentioned in the target utterance or was absent when it happened; (b) the form of the utterance: the target utterance was either a simple assertion, as in example (1), or an assertion modalized by means of the verb croire, as in example (2): (1) C'est le singe qui a renverse la tasse ('It's the monkey who knocked the cup over') (2) Je crois que c'est le singe qui a renverse la tasse ('I think it's the monkey who knocked the cup over') (c) the validity of the utterance: the proposition asserted in the target utterance was either true or false, depending on whether the boy 395

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accused the animal who had been responsible for the deed, as in examples (i) and (2) above, or the innocent animal, as in examples (3) and (4): (3) C'est le lapin qui a renverse la tasse ('It's the rabbit who knocked the cup over') (4) Je crois que c'est le lapin qui a renverse la tasse ('I think it's the rabbit who knocked the cup over') The combination of these three variables resulted in the eight types of scenarios summarized in Table 1. An example of a scenario, corresponding to Situation 1, is given in the Appendix. Procedure. Children were seen individually in the presence of two adult experiments. One experimenter showed the films, the other acted as naive interlocutor. Each child was shown successively two films out of the eight basic scenarios, namely a scenario with a true utterance and then one with a false utterance (each one involving different target actions). Within each age group five children were randomly assigned to four groups which were shown one of the following pairs of scenarios : 1 and 5, 2 and 6, 3 and 7, 4 and 8. The order of presentation was fixed within each group. After seeing each film, the child was first asked to narrate the story for the naive interlocutor, then to answer a series of systematic questions concerning the target utterance and its appropriateness in relation to the speech situation. The findings below focus on how children attribute an epistemic attitude to the target speaker in answer to the question ' Is he sure or not sure that P ? ' , where P corresponds to the assertion of the target utterance. This question was asked after two other questions, one of which elicited their recall of the target utterance ('What did he say?'), while the other invited them to provide an explanation for it (' Why did he say that ?'), After children had attributed a state of certainty or uncertainty to the target speaker, they were asked to justify their responses explicitly in answer to the question 'Why was he sure (not sure)?' RESULTS

Children's attributions of an epistemic attitude: basic response categories Children's responses to the question ' sure or not sure ?' fell into the two main categories: SURE and NOT SURE. The category SURE corresponded to responses

of the type ' He is sure that it is X', where X denoted the animal who had been accused in the target utterance. Such responses therefore attributed to the speaker an attitude of certainty, that was associated with a complement clause corresponding to the proposition contained in the target utterance. The category NOT SURE corresponded to response in which children negated the predicate sure and thereby attributed to the boy a state of uncertainty in 396

EPISTEMIC MODALITY IN FRENCH T A B L E I.

T-Situation 2

3 4 5 6 7 8

Types of scenario used as stimuli Perceptual conditions

Speaker Speaker Speaker Speaker Speaker Speaker Speaker Speaker

present present absent absent present present absent absent

Form of utterance

Validity of utterance

Simple Modalized Simple Modalized Simple Modalized Simple Modalized

True True True True False False False False

relation to the content of his target utterance. For example, given a scenario in which the speaker's target utterance was ' I think that it's the monkey who knocked the cup over', the response ' He is sure it's the monkey' (or simply 'he is sure' if there was no ambiguity concerning the complement clause) was classified as SURE, while the response ' He is not sure it's the monkey' (or simply 'He is not sure') was classified as NOT SURE.

The additional category OTHER corresponded to responses of the type ' He is sure that it is Y', where Y denoted the animal who had not been mentioned in the target utterance. For example, given the scenario about a monkey and a rabbit, where the speaker's target utterance was ' I think that it's the monkey who knocked the cup over', a response such as 'He is sure it's the rabbit' was classified OTHER. Indeed, such a response attributed to the speaker an attitude of certainty in relation to a complement clause which differed from the one mentioned in the target utterance. It is therefore inconsistent with responses classified as Sure (actually 'sure that X') and consistent with responses classified as Not Sure. Children sometimes explicitly specified the complementarity between these two categories by producing sequences of the type 'he is not sure that it is X, he is sure that it is Y'. The category NO RESPONSE was used when no response could be elicited, e.g. when the child did not answer or answered ' / don't know'. Table 2 shows the percentages of responses that fell in each of these categories within each age group. Collapsing ages, the most frequent responses were Sure (43% of subjects) and Not Sure (33%). Collapsing experimental conditions, the distribution of responses across the three age groups indicates a clear developmental progression. The category No Response was frequent in the four-year-olds and decreased progressively with age. Most of the children's responses at four and six consisted of the response sure (45% and 47%), while the response not sure was much less frequent in these age groups (20 % and 25 %). In contrast, the most frequent response at eight was not sure (53 %), while sure decreased (37 %). The effect 397

CHILD LANGUAGE

T A B L E 2. Children's attribution of an epistemic attitude (% of basic response categories within each age group, N = 40)" 4 years Sure Not sure Other No response

6 years

8 years

0-45

0-47

020

0-37 o-53

o-o s

025 008

030

O-2O

Total 043

002

o-33 0-05

008

019

* In the few cases where subjects gave successively different responses, only the first one was taken into account.

T A B L E 3. Effect of three different factors on the responses 'sure' and ' not sure' {Mean % of responses)B 4

years

6

sure

not sure

years

8 years

sure

not sure

sure

not sure

Total

sure

not sure

Perceptual conditions of speaker

Present Absent

050

ois

°-35

020

O'5°

0-35

0-45

0-23

0-40

0-25

060

030

025

070

042

042

Form of utterance

Simple Modalized

O-45 0'45

020

o-S5

005

OS5

O'35

020

040

c-45

020

070

0-52 o-3 5

o-4S

Validity of utterance

True False

070

015

075

010

050

0-45

0-65

023

020

O-2S

010

040

025

060

022

042

0

020

For each factor combination, N = 20.

of age (six vs eight years) on the frequency of the response not sure was highly significant (^(2,48) = 6533, p < 0-005). In summary, the overall results show the following global progression: children aged four and six tend to attribute certainty more frequently than uncertainty, while the attribution of uncertainty clearly increases between six and eight. The relative impact of the three main factors Table 3 shows the distribution of the response categories Sure and Not Sure as a function of the three main factors: (a) perceptual conditions of the speaker: presence vs absence during the target event; (6) form of the target utterance: simple vs modalized assertion; (c) validity of the utterance: true vs false accusation. 398

EPISTEMIC MODALITY IN FRENCH

Overall, the response sure was globally preferred when the speaker had been present and had witnessed the event, when his utterance was a simple assertion, and when this utterance was true. In contrast, the response Not sure was preferred when the speaker had been absent during the event, when he modalized his utterance, and when this utterance was false. Collapsing ages, the following effects were significant: both the form of the utterance (p < 0-05) and its validity (p < 0-005) had significant effects on the response sure; the speaker's perceptual conditions (p < 0-05), the form of the utterance (p < 0-005), a n d i t s validity (p < 0-025) had significant effects on the response not sure. Figure 1 shows the distribution of the three basic response categories within each of the eight experimental situations. As shown in this figure, certainty is maximal in Situation 1, which combines the following three properties: speaker present, simple assertion, true utterance. Thus, all children in all age groups produced only responses of the type sure in this situation. In contrast, uncertainty is maximal in Situation 8, which combines the three reverse properties: speaker absent, modalized assertion, false utterance. Thus, all children in all age groups produced responses of the type not sure in this situation. As shown in Table 3, although all three of the factors play a role in the attribution of an epistemic attitude, the effect of each varies with age. At 4; o the validity of the utterance is the only factor that has a significant effect on the response sure {p < o-oi). The four-year-old children mainly rely on the truth/falsity of the utterance to judge whether the speaker was sure or not sure. Thus, 70 % of these children responded sure when the utterance was true (Situations 1-4) versus only 2O% when the utterance was false (Situations 5—8). The responses not sure, which were rare at this age (as noted above, see Table 2), occurred mainly in the conditions where the utterance was false. In comparison, the presence/absence of the speaker during the event had little effect on the frequencies of responses sure or not sure and the use vs non-use of a modal verb in the utterance had no effect. At 6;o the validity of the utterance had a significant effect on the frequencies of both the responses sure (p < 0-0005) and not sure (p < 001). This factor remains the most important for the six-year-olds: when the utterance was true, 75 % of the subjects gave the response sure and 10% the response not sure; conversely, when the utterance was false, 20% responded sure and 40 % responded not sure. In addition, the form of the utterance had a significant effect on the frequencies of the response not sure (p < o-oi). Thus, this factor begins to play a role in this age group: the response not sure was more frequent when the assertion was modalized than when it was simple, while no such difference was observed with the youngest children. An unexpected result concerned the effect of the speaker's presence, although this effect was not statistically significant: the six-year-olds responded sure 399

CHILD LANGUAGE

4

6 8 Situation 1

4

age

6 Situation 2

No. of subjects 5

No. of subjects 5 4 3

Not sure

2 1

Sure

0 4

6 ,8 Situation 3

4

age

6 8 Situation 4

age

No. of subjects

No. of subjects 5 4

5 --Not sure

4

3

3 , Not sure Sure Other

2

4

6 8 Situation 5

2 0

age

No. of subjects 5 4

Sure Other

1 4

6 8 Situation 6

age

No. of subjects • Not sure

5 4

3

3

2

2

1 0

4

6 8 Situation 7

4

age

6 8 Situation 8

age

Fig. i. Distribution of the basic response categories for each of the eight speech situations (number of occurrences by age group). Key: sure, ; not sure, ; other, .

not only when the speaker was present and witnessed the event, but also, and even more frequently, when he was absent. For these children the lack of perceptual knowledge was not inconsistent with an epistemic attitude of certainty. 400

EPISTEMIC MODALITY IN FRENCH

At 8; o, the speaker's absence had a significant effect on the response not sure (p < 0-025) a n c ' t n e form of the utterance had a significant effect on both the responses not sure (p < 0-025) ar>d sure (P < 0-025). The validity of the utterance had no significant effect and was clearly less important in this age group than in the two younger groups. However, as shown in Table 3, this factor is not completely negligible even at this age. The presence vs absence of the speaker and the simple vs modalized form of the utterance therefore play the most important role in the eight-year-olds' responses. Thus, these children were significantly more likely to respond not sure when the speaker had been absent than when he had been present (70% vs 35 %) and when he used a modalized utterance rather than a simple one (70% vs 35%). To summarize, these analyses show some clear developmental changes concerning the factors which determine how children attribute certainty or uncertainty. The truth value of the utterance is the most important factor for the children at age four and even at six, and its role decreases only at eight. The use vs non-use of a modal device in the utterance has no effect on the youngest children's responses; this factor begins to play a role at six and its role increases thereafter. As for the presence vs absence of the speaker during the target event, its effect is only clear at eight, but either negligible or unexpected before this age.

Children's qualifications of the predicates ' sure' and ' not sure' Qualitative analyses of how children formulated their responses complement the above results. Most of the children's responses consisted of simple assertions or negations of the predicate, i.e. il est sur ('he is sure'), or il n'est par sur ('he is not sure'). However, about 20% of the responses contained qualifications which modified in various ways the basic predicate sure or not sure.

Responses were qualified by means of the following types of devices: (i) adverbial modifiers such as un peu sur ('a little sure'), stir quand meme (' nevertheless sure '),pas tres stir (' not very sure'), pas vraiment sur (' not really sure'), pas sur du tout ('not sure at all'); (it) first person epistemic modal verbs, which almost always consisted ofje crois, in utterances such asje crois qu'il est sur (' I think he is sure') or Je crois qu'il n'est pas sur (' I think he is not sure'), whereby children indicated their own uncertainty with respect to the epistemic state they attributed to the speaker; {Hi) third person epistemic modal verbs, such as il ne doit pas etre sur ('he must not be sure'), il ne peut pas en etre sur ('he cannot be sure of it'), with which children expressed a high degree of improbability or the impossibility of attributing certainty; (iv) circumstantial expressions, such as dans Vhistoire il e'tait sur (' in the story he was sure'), en tout cas dans le film on aurait dit qu'il e'tait sur ('at any rate in the film it looked like he was sure'), quand il dit, on croit qu'il est sur (' when he 401

CHILD LANGUAGE

T A B L E 4. Qualifications of the predicates 'sure' and 'not sure' (number of occurrences) 6 years

4 years

8 years

sure not sure sure not sure sure

Adverbial modifier First person modal verb Third person modal verb Circumstantial expression Total

not sure sure not sure 9

4 — 5 9

Total

i 2 12

2

6 — 5 13

10 2 2

'4

says it, one thinks he is sure'), whereby children relativized a state of certainty. Table 4 shows the frequencies of such qualifications with each predicate type. As can be seen in this table, children's use of these devices seems to vary as a function of whether they qualified sure or not sure. In order to qualify the

predicate sure, they mostly added a first person modal verb (je crois qu'il est sur,) although the oldest children also added circumstantial elements. When they chose the negative answer not sure, children mainly used adverbial expressions (such as il n'est pas tres sur), as well as a few modal verbs in the third person. Their qualifications of the predicate sure weakened the strength of the assertion of certainty or their commitment to this assertion. Their qualifications of the predicate not sure were more varied: they most frequently weakened the assertion of uncertainty, as in il n'est pas tres sur (' he is not very sure'), but in some cases also strengthened it, as in il n'est pas sur du tout (' he is not sure at all') or ilpeut pas etre sur ('he can't be sure'). Table 4 also indicates developmental changes in children's qualifications. Qualifications hardly occurred at 4; o; they were rare at 6; o, and they were most frequent at 8;o. More precisely, the first person modal verb je crois occurred from 6;o, while the third person modal verbs, as well as the circumstantial expressions, did not occur until 8;o. This pattern suggests a developmental progression in the availability of various modal devices. The frequency of adverbial modifications, which were typically used to qualify the negative form of the predicate, increased from six to eight. This development might indicate that a seemingly simple formulation such as il n'est pas tres sur ('he is not very sure'), which combines a negation with a qualified modal expression, actually involves rather complex semantic and pragmatic properties. These analyses therefore show the following developmental changes in how children formulated their responses: children produce an increasing number of qualifications of the predicate sure/not sure between six and eight years, as well as more diverse devices for such qualifications. 402

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Children's explanations of the speaker's certainty or uncertainty A final analysis concerns the explanatory comments which typically accompanied children's attributions of the epistemic state sure or not sure. These comments, which were either spontaneously produced or more often elicited by the question ' Why is he sure / not sure ?', occurred in about 60 % of the responses at age four, 65 % at six and 75 % at eight. These explanations fell into the following five major types: children justified the speaker's epistemic attitude by referring to the objective state of affairs (11 % of the explanations overall), to the speaker's perception (44%), to the speaker's cognition (24%), to the speaker's use of indices (10%), and to the speaker's utterance (10%). References to states of affairs. Children justified the speaker's epistemic state in terms of the target event itself, i.e. by focusing on who had done it, as illustrated in (5) and (6): (5) II est sur que c'est le singe, parce que c'etait lui (' He's sure that it's the monkey, because he did it'). (553) (6) II etait pas sur (que c'etait le renard), parce que c'etait Tours ('He wasn't sure, because it was the bear'). (4;8) This type of explanation characterizes epistemic states on the basis of whether or not the proposition conforms to reality. The speaker is said to be 'sure' if the proposition of the complement clause corresponds to reality and 'not sure' if it does not. Included in this response category were also some egocentric explanations (' Yes, he's sure, because I saw it'), as well as explanations that highlighted the truth of the utterance ' He's sure, because it's true that he did it'). In all cases children explain epistemic attitudes by referring to reality, viewing certainty as related to the truth of the propositional content and uncertainty as related to the falsity of this content. References to the speaker's perception. Children referred to whether the speaker has seen the target event, as shown in example (7) and (8): (7) II est sur, parce qu'il l'a vu ('He's sure because he saw it'). (8;o) (8) II est par sur, parce qu'il a pas vu le singe renverser la tasse ('He's not sure because he didn't see the monkey knock the cup over'). (8;4) Such references to the perceptual conditions usually justified an attitude of certainty in situations where the speaker had been present during the event and an attitude of uncertainty in situations where he had been absent. However, explanations of this type were sometimes used to modify the scenarios so that they would fit the epistemic attitude chosen by the child. For example, responses such as 'he is sure because he had a look' were found 403

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in situations where the speaker had been absent and responses such as ' he is not sure because he didn't see well' in situations where he had been present. In all cases this type of explanation consisted of justifying certainty as resulting from some perceptual evidence and uncertainty as resulting from the lack of such evidence. References to the speaker's cognition. Children explained certainty and uncertainty by attributing to the speaker cognitive states or activities, using other epistemic expressions which justified or paraphrased the predicates sure or not sure, e.g., (9) to (11): (9) II a vu...alors il sait que c'est la grenouille ('He has seen (it), so he knows it's the frog'). (654) (10) II est pas sur, parce qu'il sait pas si c'est le lapin ou le singe ('He's not sure, because he doesn't know whether it's the rabbit or the monkey'). (6;4) (11) II est pas sur...il croit que c'est le hibou, et puis c'est le mouton ('He's not sure...he thinks it's the owl, but it's the sheep'). (6:4) With these various cognitive expressions, children establish a relational network among different epistemic modal devices. Certainty is mainly described by means of the verb savoir ('know') in utterances such as 'he knows that it is X', 'he knows very well who it is', and so on. Uncertainty is described with the negative form of the verb nepas savoir ('not to know') in utterances such as 'he doesn't know whether it is X or Y', 'he doesn't really know', 'he can't know', etc. Another frequent cognitive verb is croire ('think/believe'). References to indices. Children mentioned some extralinguistic elements of the situation which could have served as indices on the basis of which the speaker could have made an inference, e.g. (12) and (13): (12) Je crois qu'il est sur, parce que le hibou, il est reste devant le livre (' I think he's sure, because the owl was standing next to the book'). (9; o) (13) II n'est pas tres sur... parce que les lions aussi ils ont des grosses dents ('He's not very sure... because lions too have big teeth'). (8;o) In explanations of this type, epistemic attitudes are viewed as subjective processes. In particular, certainty is seen as resulting from a mental activity, i.e. an inference on the part of the speaker, that is quite close to a conviction. Indices were mentioned only in conditions where the speaker had not witnessed the action. They most often referred to some aspects of the scenario concerning the animal accused, as in (12), but sometimes consisted of some intrinsic characteristics of the animals, as in (13). References to indices mainly served to explain certainty. They occurred rarely as 404

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13 0 Age 4 6 State of affairs

Speaker's perception

Speaker's cognition

Speaker's utterance

Fig. 2. Distribution of the five types of explanation across the three age groups.

explanations for uncertainty and mostly in the oldest children's responses. As shown in (13) such explanations for uncertainty indeed presuppose a rather sophisticated understanding of pieces of evidence that can serve as the basis for both positive and negative inferences. References to the speaker's utterance. These explanations focused on the target utterance, i.e. on the fact that the speaker had produced this utterance rather than another, as the most relevant feature in order to attribute to him a state of certainty or of uncertainty, e.g. (14) and (15): (14) II a dit: 'c'est l'hippopotame qui a renverse les bonbons', alors il est sur ('He said: "it's the hippopotamus who spilled the sweeties", so he's sure'). (7; 10) (15) II etait pas tres sur...parce qu'il a dit... '9a doit etre le hibou qui a fait 9a'...Ben quand on dit '9a doit etre le hibou', 9a veut dire que c'est peut-etre pas lui ('He wasn't very sure, because he said 'it must be the owl'. When one says that, it means that maybe it's not the owl). (8; 10)

Such responses either mentioned the utterance as a whole or focused on some specific linguistic property, such as the use of a modal device. However, with target utterances consisting of simple assertions, it is difficult to know whether children referred to the form of the utterance or to its content. Certainty was most frequently inferred from the fact that the speaker had uttered accusation in the form of a simple assertion, while a modalized utterance was considered as a cue for uncertainty. Figure 2 shows the distribution of these five types of explanation across the three age groups. As can be seen in this figure, two types of explanation were frequent at all ages: references to the speaker's perception and to his 405 JCL 19

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cognitive state. These two frequent types of explanation increased slightly with age. The other three types of explanation were less frequent, but showed some clear progressions. References to objective states of affairs were predominant at four and gradually decreased with age. In contrast, references to indices, as well as references to the speaker's utterance, were very rare at four and increased with age, the first ones being predominant at six and the second at eight. All these types of explanation were used to justify both categories Sure and Not Sure. However, the most frequent explanations for the category Sure consisted of references to the speaker's perception (49 % of the explanations provided for sure). References to his cognitive state and to indices were less frequent (15% each) and references to his utterance were rare (9%). In contrast, the most frequent explanations for not sure were references to the speaker's cognition (37%) as well as references to his perception (33%). References to the utterance were more frequent to explain not sure (13%) than sure, while indices were very rare (3 %). References to the state of affairs were used as frequently to justify sure (11%) and not sure (13 %). Qualitative analyses of children's explanations consisting of references to the speaker's cognition and to his utterance show the following developmental change concerning the use of the modal verb croire ('think'/'believe'). Examples of four-year-olds' explanations involving the expression il croit ('he thinks') are shown in (16) and (17): (16) II est sur. Surement il croit que c'est lui, c'est le singe ('He's sure. Surely he thinks he did it, it's the monkey'). (5;6) (17) II etait sur... C'est parce qu'il croyait qu'il (le singe) avait renverse la tasse, mais il l'avait renversee la tasse (' He was sure. It's because he thought he (the monkey) had knocked the cup over, but he had knocked the cup over'). (4;8) In such responses the expression il croit was used as a paraphrase of il est sur and it was furthermore complemented by an assessment of the truth of the proposition. In addition, some of the few children in this age group who referred to the speaker's utterance to justify his epistemic attitude also associated a modalized utterance with certainty, as in (18): (18) II etait sur que c'etait la grenouille... parce qu'il a dit 'je crois que c'est le grenouille qui a abime...('He was sure that it was the frog, because he said " I think it's the frog who spoiled..."'). (415) In contrast, in the older children's explanations, the expression il croit was used to paraphrase il n'est pas sur and to refer to a false belief, as. in (11) above. When these older children referred to the speaker's utterance, they clearly considered the presence of a modal verb as evidence for an attitude of 406

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uncertainty (e.g. see (15) above). Such contrasted examples suggest that in four-year-olds' discourse the verb croire is used in a paraphrastic relation with other forms expressing certainty. The use of this verb as marking uncertainty does not become systematic until about 6;o. In summary, the analyses of children's explanations about the epistemic state they attribute to the speaker show that the most frequent types of explanation at all ages involve references to the speaker's perception and cognition. In addition, four-year-olds frequently refer to objective states of affairs, while six- and eight-year-olds use two other types of explanation: references to indices on the basis of which the speaker could have made an inference, and references to the speaker's utterance, particularly to his use of modal devices. A qualitative analysis of some explanations indicates a specific developmental change concerning the verb croire, which seems to be used as a mark of certainty by the youngest children. DISCUSSION

The aim of this study was to examine how children evaluate the conditions of use for modal expressions marking certainty and uncertainty, and to investigate developmental changes in their conceptions of such epistemic notions. The results showed, first, a developmental dissymmetry in the attribution of certainty and uncertainty, since the four- and six-year-old children, in contrast to the eight-year-olds, clearly preferred to attribute an attitude of certainty to the speaker. This result agrees with previous results obtained in a comprehension experiment (Bassano, 19856), where a similar discrepancy was observed in the understanding of the expressions je suis sur (' I am sure') and je ne suis pas sur (' I am not sure'), the latter being correctly interpreted much later than the former. Such results suggest that the two epistemic categories of certainty and uncertainty, as they are expressed by the phrases etre sur and ne pas etre sur, involve distinct types of abilities or processes corresponding to different levels in children's development. In particular, the understanding of uncertainty requires some understanding of the idea that something can be undetermined, which has been shown in various studies to be a late development (e.g. Champaud, 1985). Another set of findings concerned the cues used by children to infer epistemic attitudes of certainty or uncertainty in speakers and the ways in which they explicitly explained their choices. Particular attention was paid to three factors: the speaker's perceptual access to evidence or lack thereof, his use or non-use of a modal verb in his utterance, and the truth or falsity of this utterance. A first important results of these analyses is the strong impact of the truth/falsity of the utterance on children's responses in the two younger groups. This result can be compared to the findings reported by other studies about mental term comprehension (Miscione et al. 1978; Wellman & 407 15-2

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Johnson, 1979; Johnson & Wellman, 1980), in which four-year-olds seemed to interpret mental verbs such as know, guess, and remember mostly on the basis of real external events. The present study shows similar phenomena concerning be sure and not be sure, in a more explicit and systematic way. Indeed, the strong impact of truth value on the four-year-olds' judgements is typically reflected in their explanations: children explicitly indicate that one ' is sure' of an event if this event really occurred and, conversely, that one 'is not sure' if it did not occur in that way. Moreover, the effect was clearly observed even in the six-year-olds' judgements, although it was less frequently accompanied by explanations referring to reality. Such response patterns clearly indicate a confusion, which is related to the impact of real events in children's interpretation of these notions. The nature of such a confusion, however, is difficult to interpret, especially in light of current debates about children's developing 'theory of mind' (see Astington, Harris & Olson, 1988). Recently, studies have examined various aspects of children's distinction between the mental and the real, such as their understanding of tKe distinction between appearance and reality (for instance,

Taylor & Flavell, 1984), their ability to distinguish mental entities from real ones (Wellman & Estes, 1986) and to reason about beliefs (Wellman & Bartsch, 1988), their understanding of false beliefs (Wimmer & Perner, 1983; Perner, Leekam & Wimmer, 1987; Perner, 1988; Wimmer, Hogrefe & Sodian, 1988). In general, this research tends to show that relatively young children have already developed a conception of mental phenomena such as beliefs, intentions, desires, expectations, etc, as distinct from real ones. In particular, Wellman (1988) argues against a theory of 'childhood realism', claiming that even three-year-olds show evidence for a theory of mind that is similar to an adult conception. However, these claims have to be at least qualified, given some difficulties encountered by young children in various tasks, such as their difficulties in understanding false beliefs or in understanding the distinction between seeing and knowing. Thus, Taylor's research (1988) indicates that until about six years of age children have difficulty differentiating their own knowledge about an object in a picture from the perceptual information available to a less informed observer. Such results are consistent with the predominant pattern that was observed in our study with the youngest subjects' responses. These responses cannot indicate a mere confusion between mental and real objects, all the more because the effect is still quite notable at age six. This confusion can best be described as resulting from an equation between the speaker's epistemic attitude and the truth value of his utterance. Various hypotheses can be put forward to explain this equation. For example, the child (who has always witnessed the target event) might express his own point of view instead of the speaker's. In addition, the confusion observed in our research could be related to children's processing of linguistic forms. When young children have to 408

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interpret an epistemic modal statement such as X is sure that P, X is not sure that P, they might tend to take into account primarily or exclusively the more salient aspects of the utterance, i.e. the proposition P, which corresponds to the assertion about reality, and the negation marker in the case of not sure that P, which results in a negative interpretation of the propositional content. As a second finding, the analyses of children's cues and explanations show that the role of the speaker's perceptual conditions does not seem to be a determining factor, except for the eight-year-olds. Such a result could indicate that children's understanding of the relation between epistemic expression and various sources of background knowledge is a late development. Conclusions of this type are also reached in other studies. For instance, in the verb-choice task used by Abbeduto & Rosenberg (1985), children under the age of seven did not seem to take into account the perceptual conditions given by the context (reliable or unreliable evidence) when choosing the appropriate verb in pairs such as think/believe or know/believe. The case of sure and not sure is rather complex. Although direct perceptual evidence usually results in certainty, certainty may also be acquired on the basis of more indirect kinds of evidence, such as deductive inferences. The paradoxical pattern found in the six-year-olds' responses, who frequently attributed certainty when the speaker had not directly witnessed the event, could be considered as a first understanding of some polyvalence in the use of the expression be sure. The frequent references to indices at this age are in accordance with this interpretation in the sense that these responses present certainty as a deductive inference. At about the age of six, then, children become aware of the complex conditions of use for sure, particularly of the varied sources of background knowledge it involves. Finally, these analyses show children's developing knowledge and awareness of some linguistic devices. The present data demonstrate that the form of the speaker's utterance begins to be relevant for the six-year-olds, becoming predominant for the eight-year-olds, who also frequently refer to the speaker's use of a modal device to justify their responses. Such a finding points out important developmental changes in the network of children's notions concerning epistemic modality and particularly in their notions concerning the semantics and pragmatics of the verb croire. Analyses of how children reported the target utterance in their narratives and during the interview (Bassano et al. 1988; Champaud et al. in press; Hickmann et al. 1990; in press) have shown that the youngest children have difficulties reporting this modal verb faithfully. In particular, the youngest children tended not to recall the modal verb when it was present in the speaker's utterance, presenting the utterance as a simple assertion. However, omissions were also more frequent at all ages when this verb was inappropriately used by the target speaker (e.g. when he had witnessed the event). The present study indicates that, although the four-year-olds are not insensitive to the 409

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appropriateness conditions for the modal verb croire, they do not consider the speakers' use of this verb as marking uncertainty when they explicitly attribute epistemic states to others. In addition, they tend to use this verb in their own discourse as a paraphrase of be sure. For the youngest children, therefore, croire mainly conveys a notion of conviction, while it is not the case anymore for children from about six years on, who clearly relate it to uncertainty. Such observations agree with the results of previous comprehension tasks (Bassano, 1985a, b), which indicate that before 6;o children do not differentiate the iorm je crois from a form such as;'e sais ('I know') mostly interpreting it as expressing certainty. Children's attention to the speaker's utterance may also be related to a gradual developmental progression in their metalinguistic abilities. In the present study children show an increasing tendency after 6;o years to infer attitudes from what speakers say and to rely on linguistic cues to make predictions about them. This tendency is accompanied by their increasing use of more qualified formulations to express certainty and uncertainty, since the eight-year-olds provide various types of modifications, which result in more subtle responses and more relativized notions. Such a progression has been reported by other studies focusing on reported speech and on metapragmatics (Hickmann, 1985, 1992; Hickmann et al. 1990, in press; Hickmann & Warden, 1991), as well as on other metalinguistic abilities (see a review in Gombert, 1990). Thus, related results were found by Hickmann & Warden in a study of how children report dialogues containing an assertion which is inappropriate because of insufficient background knowledge: sevento eight-year-old children omit this utterance, while nine-year-olds often transform it into the appropriate expression of a hope or a false belief by means of modal devices. In conclusion, the present study points out some important developmental changes in children's conceptions of the epistemic notions of certainty and uncertainty. The responses of the four-year-olds are mainly determined by a 'realistic' conception of these epistemic notions. This conception is accompanied by an overgeneralization of the category of certainty, to which children associate a modal verb such as croire, while uncertainty is rarely attributed to speakers. The six-year-olds still fail to recognize uncertainty, but their responses show the emergence of a 'subjective' conception of certainty which competes with the earlier realistic conception during a transitional phase. According to this subjective conception, certainty is viewed as resulting from a deductive inference, i.e. from a subjective and constructive process, rather than from perceptual evidence or conformity to reality. It is not until 8;o that children clearly recognize the conditions which characterize uncertainty. At this age, they often determine speakers' epistemic attitudes on the basis of linguistic markings contained in their utterances and provide subtle formulations to qualify and explain these attitudes, thus 410

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showing the development of a metalingusitic and relativized notion of certainty and uncertainty.

REFERENCES Abbeduto, L. & Rosenberg, S. (1985). Children's knowledge of the presuppositions of'know' and other cognitive verbs, Journal of Child Language 12, 621-41. Astington, J. W., Harris, P. L. & Olson, D. R. (1988). Developing theories of mind. New York: C.U.P. Bassano, D. (1982). Etude sur la modalite croire: Interpretation d'enonces avec 'croire que' chez des enfants de 6 a 11 ans. Archives de Psychologie 50, 165-90. (1985a). Five-years-olds' understanding of 'savoir' and 'croire' Journal of Child Language 12, 417-32. (19856). Modalites de 1'opinion: quelques expressions de la croyance et de la certitude et leur differenciation entre 6 et 11 ans. Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive 5, 65-87. (1986). Focusing in statement interpretation. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 15, (1990). De la logique au langage: vers une psycholinguistique de l'enonciation. Archives de Psychologie 58, 213-34. Bassano, D. & Champaud, C. (1983). L'interpretation d'enonces modaux de type assertif ('savoir que') chez l'enfant de 6 a 11 ans. VAnnie Psychologique 83, 53-73. Bassano, D., Champaud, C. & Hickmann, M. (1988). Statement modalities in reported speech by French children. Paper presented at the Third European Conference on Developmental Psychology, Budapest. Bassano, D., Champaud, C. & Hickmann, M. (1989). Epistemic modality in French children's discourse. Paper presented at the Biennial meeting at the Society for Research in Child Development, Kansas City. Champaud, C. (1985). Acceptation et refus de l'endetermination chez des enfants de 6 a 8 ans. Archives de Psychologie 53, 273-29. Champaud, C. & Bassano, D. (1984). L'interpretation d'enonces avec 'savoir si' chez des enfants de 6 a 11 ans. Bulletin de Psychologie 364, 299-3' 1 • Champaud, C, Bassano, D. & Hickmann, M. (1992). Modalitie epistemique et discours rapporte chez l'enfant francais. In N. Dittmar & A. Reich (eds), Modality in language acquisition. Berlin: De Gruyter (in press). Gombert, ]. E. (1990). le developpement metalinguistique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Halliday, M. A. K. (1970). Functional diversity in language as seen from a consideration of modality and mood in English. Foundations of Language 6, 322-61. (1975). Learning how to mean. Explorations in the development of language. London: E. Arnold. Harris, R. J. (1975). Children's comprehension of complex sentences. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 19, 420-33. Hickmann, M. (1985). Metapragmatics in child language In E. Mertz & R. J. Parmentier (eds), Semiotic mediations : Sociocultural and psychological perspectives. New York: Academic Press. (1992). The boundaries of reported speech: some developmental aspects. In J. Lucy (ed.), Reflexive language: reported speech and metapragmatics. Cambridge: C.U.P. (in press). Hickmann, M., Bassano, D. & Champaud, C. (1990). Children's awareness of epistemic modality: some evidence from reported conversations. Paper presented at the Fourth European Conference on Developmental Psychology, Stirling. Hickmann, M., Champaud, C. & Bassano, D. (in press). Pragmatics and metapragmatics in the development of epistemic modality: evidence from French children's reports of thinkstatements. 411

CHILD LANGUAGE Hickmann, M. & Warden, D. (1991). Children's narrative strategies when reporting appropriate and inappropriate speech events. Pragmatics 1, 27-70. Hidi, S. H. E. & Hildyard, A. (1979). Four-year-olds' understanding of pretend and forget: no evidence for prepositional reasoning. Journal of Child Language 6, 493-510. Hirst, W. & Weil, J. (1982). Acquisition of epistemic and deontic modals. Journal of Child Language 9, 659-66. Hopmann, M. R. & Maratsos, M. P. (1978). A developmental study of factivity and negation in complex sentences. Journal of Child Language 5, 295-309. Johnson, C. N. (1982). Acquisition of mental verbs and the concept of mind. In S. Kuczaj (ed.), Language development Vol I. Syntax and semantics. Hillsdale, N. J. Erlbaum. Johnson, C. N. & Maratsos, M. P. (1977). Early comprehension of mental verbs: think and know. Child Development 48, 1743-7. Johnson, C. N. & Wellman, H. M. (1980). Children's developing understanding of mental verbs: remember, know, and guess. Child Development 51, 1095-1102. Macnamara, J., Baker, E. & Olson, C. L. (1976). Four-year-olds' understanding of pretend, forget and know: evidence for propositional operations. Child Development 47, 62-70. Miscione, J. L., Marvin, R. S., O'Brien, R. G. & Greenberg, M. T. (1978). A developmental study of preschool children's understanding of the words know and guess. Child Development 49,

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Moore, C. & Davidge, J. (1989). The development of mental terms: pragmatics or semantics? Journal of Child Language 16, 633-41. Perner, J. (1988). Developing semantics for theories of mind: from propositional attitudes to mental representation. In J. W. Astington, P. L. Harris & D. R. Olson (eds), Developing theories of mind. New York: C.U.P. Perner, J., Leekam, S. R. & Wimmer, H. (1987). Three-year-olds' difficulty with false belief: the case for a conceptual deficit. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 5, 125-37. Scoville, R. P. & Gordon, A. M. (1980). Children's understanding of factive presuppositions: an experiment and a review. Journal of Child Langauge 7, 381-99. Shatz, M., Wellman, H. & Silber, S. (1983). The acquisition of mental verbs: a systematic investigation of the first reference to mental state. Cognition 14, 301-21. Stephany, U. (1986). Modality. In P. Fletcher & H. Garman (eds), Language acquisition. Cambridge: C. U. P. Taylor, M. (1988). The development of children's understanding of the seeing-knowing distinction. In J. W. Astington, P. L. Harris & D. R. Olson (eds), Developing theories of mind. New York: C. U. P. Taylor, M. & Flavell, J. H. (1984). Seeing and believing: children's understanding of the distinction between appearance and reality. Child Development 55, 1710-20. Wellman, H. M. (1988). First steps in the child's theorizing about the mind. In J. W. Astington, P.L.Harris & D.R.Olson (eds), Developing theories of mind. New York: C.U.P. Wellman, H. M. & Bartsch, K. (1988). Young children's reasoning about beliefs. Cognition 30, 239-77. Wellman, H. M. & Estes, D. (1986). Early understanding of mental entities: a re-examination of childhood realism. Child Development 57, 910-23. Wellman, H. M. & Johnson, C. N. (1979). Understanding mental processes: a developmental study of remember and forget. Child Development 50, 79-88. Wimmer, H. & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception. Cognition 13, 103-28. Wimmer, H., Hogrefe, J. & Sodian, B. (1988). A second stage in children's conception of mental life: understanding informational accesses as origins of knowledge and belief. In J. W. Astington, P. L. Harris & D. R. Olson (eds), Developing theories of mind. New York:

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APPENDIX Example of scenario (Situation i) (The girl, a rabbit, and a monkey have entered the stage. The girl is showing a cup.) Girl: Je viens d'acheter cette belle tasse, et je ne veux pas qu'on l'abime. Si vous y touchez, vous serez punis, vous deux, le lapin et le singe. ('I've just bought this lovely cup, and I don't want it to be broken. If you touch it, both of you - rabbit and monkey - will be punished.') (The boy comes in.) Girl: Tiens, bonjour Paul. Je vais a la cuisine preparer du the. Est-ce que tu peux faire attention que le lapin et le singe ne touchent pas a ma tasse ? (' Hello, good morning Paul. I am going to the kitchen to make some tea. Can you make sure that the rabbit and the monkey don't touch my cup ?') Boy: Bon, d'accord. ('OK') (The girl leaves, the boy remains.) Monkey: Voyons voir. Peut-etre qu'il y a quelque chose dans cette tasse, j'ai soif moi. ('Let's see now. Maybe there's something in that cup. I'm thirsty.') (The monkey grasps the cup and knocks it over.) Boy (during the action): Mais fais attention! (' Be careful!') Monkey (after the action): Oh! je vais me faire gronder. ('Oh! I'm gonna be scolded.') Rabbit: Bon, moi je m'en vais. ('OK, I'm leaving.') (The rabbit leaves — The girl comes back.) Girl: Oh! ma tasse ! qu'est-ce-que s'est passe ? (' Oh, my cup ! what happened ? ')

Boy: C'est le singe qui a renverse la tasse. (' It's the monkey who knocked the cup over.') Monkey: Ah non, c'est pas moi! ('Oh no, I didn't') Girl: Ca m'est bien egal qui l'a renversee. Puisque c'est comme 9a, vous serez tous punis. (' I don't care who did it. But now, you will all be punished.')

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