Preschoolers’ Developing Understanding of Factivity in Mental Verb Comprehension and Its Relation to First- and Second-Order False Belief Understanding: A Longitudinal Study

It has been argued that the distinction between factivity and non-factivity is more fundamental to mental state understanding than that between false beliefs and reality. The present study examined children’s growing understanding of all possible contrasts between the factive verb “know” and the non-factive verbs “think” and “guess” longitudinally between the ages of 50 and 94 months and investigated its relations to first- and second-order FB...