International Centre for Language and Communicative Development: Training Children’s Understanding of False Belief with Different Types of Complement Clauses, 2014-2020

This training study was conducted to investigate whether children’s understanding of false belief can be improved by exposing them to (1) first-person complements (e.g. “I said that it was a rabbit”) (2) third-person complements (e.g. “He said that it was a rabbit”), and/or (3) simple language (“It wasn’t a rabbit”) in different play scenarios (e.g. looking at peephole books). Children were tested in one of three training conditions. Before and during the 5 training sessions, we also measured their executive functioning, their general language skills, their comprehension and repetition of complement clauses, and their understanding of mental verbs with first and third-person subjects (e.g.,”I think vs. “I know”; “he thinks” vs “he knows”) to check if any of these factors explain their improvement in false-belief understanding or whether they would interact with training. Files: LuCiD_WP8_S2_Abbreviations.xlsx This file explains all abbreviations and variables used in the csv files and R scripts included and listed below. LuCiD_WP8_S2_All.csv This file contains all raw data in short format used to analyse which predictor variables and different training conditions affect children’s improvement in false belief (EFB.cha.all). LuCiD_WP8_S2_EFB.csv This file is in long format to illustrate children’s performance in each false belief tests (i.e. contents self, contents other, identity self, identity other, location self).