Speaker: 
Irina Polyanskaya

Title:
Linguistic recursion and second-order false belief reasoning

Abstract:
Both first-order and second-order false belief mastery are viewed as important in acquisition of Theory of Mind, the capacity to ascribe mental states. Our logical analysis of second-order false-belief tasks shows that this sort of reasoning involves recursion. Language involves recursion as well; recursive possessive and complements clauses are clear examples.
 
The development of second-order social reasoning is complex and depends on both individual cognitive resources and immersion in a wide range of interactive contexts. But since the ‘usual’ interactive contexts do not make the same sense to children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), it has been proposed that they may use language as scaffolding in false-belief understanding.
 
We hypothesize that competency in linguistic recursion predicts second-order false belief mastery for children with ASD.  In this talk I will discuss our hypothesis, and how it is tested in our ongoing  randomized controlled training study.

This is joint work with Patrick Blackburn and Torben Braüner.