Discourse cues for the acquisition of the contrafactive verb "yiwei" in Mandarin

In this study, we investigate whether pragmatic cues in the discourse context can help Mandarin-speaking children acquire the contrafactive verb "yiwei" (incorrectly think). In contrast to nonfactive belief verbs, such as "juede" (think), "yiwei" is negatively biased and commonly used to report false belief (Glass, 2023). Previous studies show that children at the age of 4 can distinguish between the two verbs, and the use of "yiwei" facilitates understanding of false-belief sentences and general false-belief abilities (Lee et al., 1999; Zhang & Zhou, 2021). However, the factors that facilitate the acquisition of "yiwei" remain unclear. One possible factor is the discourse context in which "yiwei" occurs: compared to "juede," "yiwei" is more likely to be used in contexts that highlight that the embedded content p is false. Hence, in this study, we first extract child-directed speech involving the target verbs, "yiwei" and "juede," and their contexts from the Mandarin CHILDES corpora. Then, we use the Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP) to test whether Mandarin-speaking adults are more likely to use "yiwei" than "juede" when a clear discourse context cue is provided to support not p.