Feels versus looks: Theory of mind, language, and children's developing understanding of subjective perspective

The current study examined the advanced theory-of-mind abilities of forty-eight 6-, 7- and 8-year-olds (range = 5;4--8;6). Children's understanding of the subjective-objective distinction inherent in the words feels and looks was assessed by using the "looks/feels task". Their performance on this task was also examined in relation to performance on several theory-of-mind tasks: a second-order false-belief task and two "interpretive theory-of-mind" tasks, namely the droodles and ambiguous figures tasks. Children's receptive and expressive language skills were also assessed using the Test of Early Language Development Third Edition (TELD-3). Results indicated that all children performed at chance when needing to assign the referent of an ambiguous pronoun in reported speech containing the word looks. Only 8-year-olds succeeded at assigning the referent of the ambiguous pronoun in sentences containing the word feels. Significant developmental trends were found for second-order false-belief and droodles tasks, but not for the ambiguous figures task. However, those trends were accounted for by children's language ability generally.