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« NSF Grant to Christopher Potts | Main | WHISC Turns 3»

Peggy Speas Colloquium

Peggy Speas
UMass Amherst

Evidentials, embedding and the acquisition of theory of mind

Friday, November 10, 3:30 pm, Machmer W-26

Abstract

Cognitive theorists acknowledge that mature Theory of Mind involves the understanding of others' false beliefs (Dennett, 1978), It is also clear that there are many component processes that contribute to mature Theory of Mind, such as reading intentions and desires, understanding true beliefs vs. pretend, appreciating alternative viewpoints and understanding ignorance versus knowing. Although there is general consensus that coordinating multiple perspectives simultaneously is the fundamental ability required to understand false belief (Perner et al, 2002), neither the target state nor the stages preceding it are well-understood.

The group working on the NSF grant project on Indexicality and Epistemology in English, Navajo and Tibetan is exploring how syntactic abilities are related to the development of concepts about the minds of others. To this end, we are combining field work on modality and embedded indexicals in Navajo and Tibetan with language acquisition experiments on modality and embedding in English and Tibetan. I will talk about what we have done so far and what we hope to do in the next few years.