Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In contrast to nonfactive belief verbs, such as the English "think" and Mandarin "juede" (to think/feel), the Mandarin contrafactive belief verb "yiwei" is negatively biased and commonly used to report false beliefs (Glass, 2023, 2025). Previous studies show that children can distinguish between nonfactives and contrafactives by 4 years of age, and the use of "yiwei" facilitates understanding of false-belief sentences and false-belief abilities more generally (Lee et al., 1999; Zhang & Zhou, 2022). However, it remains unclear how children learn that "yiwei" is contrafactive. One possible factor is the discourse context in which "yiwei" occurs: compared to "juede," "yiwei" is more likely to occur in contexts that highlight that the content of the attributed belief is false. In this talk, we will first review the arguments for treating "yiwei" as a contrafactive. Then, we will present an empirical study investigating whether discourse information can serve as a learning cue for acquiring "yiwei" using a modified version of the Human Simulation Paradigm (Gillette et al., 1999). The results suggest that discourse might be one of the cues facilitating the acquisition of "yiwei," while other linguistic cues remain to be explored.