Conversational perspective-taking and false belief attribution: A longitudinal study

The aim of this study was to explore the developmental links between conversational perspective-taking and false belief attribution. To examine this, 81 children aged between 3 and 4 years participated in a longitudinal study over a period of I year, with three measurement sessions being performed at 6-month intervals. The children were assessed by means of sets of tasks involving conversational perspective-taking, false belief attribution and language. The results show that false belief attribution scores, at a given age, are predicted to a significant extent, irrespective of the sessions compared, by the variations in conversational perspective-taking scores at an earlier age, whereas the reverse is not observed. These results support the hypothesis that perspective-taking experience contributes to the development of belief representation during the preschool period.