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Five-year-olds' understanding of ‘savoir’ and ‘croire’*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Dominique Bassano
Dominique Bassano
Affiliation:
Centre d'Etude des Processus cognitifs et du Langage, Paris
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Abstract

The interpretation of French statements involving the verbs savoir (‘to know’) and croire (‘to think’) was studied in a group of children aged from 4; 1 to 1. The experiment consisted in asking subjects to attribute four sentences (‘I know that P’, ‘I know that not-P’, ‘I do not know if P’, ‘I think that P’) to fictitious speakers (dolls placed in various situations of knowledge). Results enable us to infer levels of understanding, to locate the main difficulties in the processing of each statement, and to bring out recurrent confusions between the expressions. These results are interpreted as the expression of the processes contributing to the elaboration of ‘modalization’ in the child.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , June 1985 , pp. 417 - 432
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

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