Linguistics Colloquium: Inbal Eilon

Inbal Eilon, University of Haifa

Title: The acquisition of mental state verbs by Hebrew speaking children

Abstract:

Mental state verbs (MSV) are part of the primary language instruments people use to describe the knowledge, thoughts, feelings and desires of themselves and others. These verbs begin to appear in children's language at the age of 18 months and develop in terms of frequency, diversity, pragmatic use and comprehension throughout childhood. This developmental process occurs in different languages when the first category of MSV to appear are desires verbs, followed by verbs of perception, physiology, and emotions. The last type of verbs is the cognitive verbs which express one's thoughts, knowledge and beliefs.  

The current study aims to describe the developmental process of MSV in Hebrew-speaking children and estimate its relationship with language and Theory of Mind abilities. 60 typically developing children ages three to ten years will be tested in tasks that examine both production and comprehension of MSV: parental questionnaire that evaluates MSV vocabulary, narrative production, sentence completion task targeting MSV, understanding certainty of MSV in a preference task, and comprehension of factivity of MSV. Additionally, children will be tested in Theory of Mind and linguistic tasks (production and comprehension of verbs and a sentence repetition task). We predict that the developmental process of the different MSV categories will be shown, as in other languages, and that the diversity and amount of MSV use and comprehension will improve with age. Additionally, we expect a positive correlation between Theory of Mind, linguistic abilities and MSV performance.

The lecture will discuss the theoretical background of MSV development, the tasks used in the research, and preliminary findings from typically developing Hebrew-speaking children.

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