Camilo R. Ronderos, University of Oslo

Work in developmental pragmatics has shown that even though infants display refined mindreading abilities, older children struggle to understand language phenomena that rely on mindreading. This apparent mismatch could be partially explained by considering children’s growing sensitivity to social categories such as their interlocutor’s age. Based on recent work in philosophy of mind, we investigated how social categorization impacts children’s developing mindreading abilities during language comprehension. We tested the hypothesis that social-category-based reasoning follows the same developmental trajectory typically described for children’s mindreading skills. In a picture-selection task, Norwegian participants (ages 3-9, N=119) made decisions regarding a speaker’s (child or adult) preferences by choosing between images showing stereotypically child-coded and adult-coded items. Young children preferentially selected the child-coded image regardless of the speaker’s age, while older children preferred the stereotypically adult-coded image when they heard the adult speaker only. Participants’ performance in the picture-selection task was also predicted by their scores on a standard false-belief task. These results suggest that mindreading has a social dimension that develops in tandem with other mindreading abilities. We argue that future studies in developmental pragmatics should consider social-category differences between participants and speakers when drawing conclusions about children’s mindreading abilities and how these are reflected in their interpretation of verbal utterances.