UC Santa Barbara

Recent research has argued that children’s understanding of false belief depends on a conceptual grasp of the distinction between “sense” and “reference”. One strand of evidence for this view is a correlation between false belief task performance and tasks assessing the ability to understand a statement indicating that a character described via two different descriptions is in fact the same person (“identity tasks”). The current experiment presented children ranging from 3-5 years of age with a false belief task along with standard versions of this identity task and a modified, “no-conflict” version in which the order of information presented removes a hypothesized pragmatic implication that the different descriptions refer to different entities. Results revealed equivalent performance across all three tasks in younger children, but among older children, the “no-conflict” version of the identity task was performed significantly better than the other two tasks. No reliable association between any tasks was observed in either age group. These results support the conclusions that: 1) identity statement tasks aimed at tapping the “sense-reference distinction” may include pragmatic as well as conceptual demands, and 2) the pragmatic performance demands inherent in identity tasks appear to stem from a different source than performance demands argued to afflict elicited measures of false belief understanding.