The Relation Between Children's Ability To Alternative Naming And Understand False Belief

The existing experiment results indicate that there are significant correlations between children's performance on alternative naming tasks and false belief task. Perner et al. firstly use Repecseatational Understanding of Mind (RUM) theory to explain the robust developmental synchronization between children's ability to alternative naming and understanding false belief. Lately they put forward a new theory: Perspectival Understanding of Mind (PUM) to illustrate the relation between the two abilities, and they also use this theory as the internal cognitive mechanism of children's theory of mind.The current study includes two experiments. In experiment One, Perner et al.'s results are testified among a sample of 50 children aged 3-5 from the affiliated kindergarten of SWNU. Children are tested by six alternative naming tasks: synonym task (SYN), category task (CAT), (SYN aad CAT are combined as NN alternative naming task), name/color task (NC), name/part task (NP), color/color task (CC) and part/part task (PP), and false belief task (unexpected transfer task). Children's performances on all the tasks are compared. In experiment Two, the other two alternative naming tasks designed by ourselves are used to test the same subjects: name/function task (NF) and antonym task (ANT). The results are compared with the results of experiment One. Under the condition of this study, the conclusions are as follows:(1) Children's performance on NN alternative naming task is significantly correlated with their performance on false belief task, even if age and verbal intelligence are partialled out. The other four alternative naming tasks, i.e. NC, NP, CC, PP, are fairly easy to children, and have no significant correlation with false belief task. This confirm the results of Perner et al., indicates there are few cultural differences on this issue. The developmental synchronization between children's ability to alternative naming and understand false belief can be better explained by Perspectival Understanding of Mind (PUM) theory than several other theories, such as Representational Understanding of Mind (RUM) theory, Mutual Exclusivity (ME) Hypothesis and Cognitive Complexity and Control (CCC) theory.(2) When age and verbal intelligence are partialled out, NF task has no significant correlation with NN task and false belief task, indicates that the difficulty of NN task dosen't lie in the missing of visual clues.(3) ANT task have significant correlation with NN task and false belief task even when age and verbal intelligence are partialled out, indicates that executive control have a close relation with children's ability to alternative naming and understand false belief.(4) Children's ability to alternative naming may vary with the task materials. There is "the effect of familiarity", i.e., the materials are more familiar to children, the task is more easy. Children's ability to alternative naming and theory of mind may be the results of interaction between a general cognitive base and task specificity.