Eighteen-month-old children can update false-beliefs on the basis of verbal information in a referentially ambiguous communicative context

We investigated whether 18-month-old children were capable of updating third-person representations about object location based on verbal information. Whether verbal information was applicable to the update was determined by the pragmatic context. For this, we used a location change paradigm that required mapping a novel label to one of two unfamiliar objects, only possible if young children tracked the protagonist's belief state. Children witnessed an object-hiding event by the protagonist, who was later deprived of visual access to the relocation of the objects by a second person. We manipulated the timepoint of verbal information given about the location change to determine if the protagonist's false-belief could be corrected to a true-belief (false-belief to true-belief, test condition) or not (false-belief stays false-belief, control condition). Across both conditions, children mapped the label to the correct object based on the protagonist's belief state, taking into account verbal information when applicable. Our results imply that children track pragmatic references in the context of social partners' belief states and can update these references based on verbal information even before the onset of fluent speech production. Our findings contrast with studies in which young children were unable to update their first-person representation of object location based on verbal information. We propose that, due to their early social sensitivity, young children develop the capacity to update third-person representations before they can update their own, which might aid early language acquisition.