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Children’s Illusory Transparency of Intention: Construal versus Pragmatic View

ABSTRACT This article explores the illusory transparency phenomenon in childhood and tests two accounts of the phenomenon: the construal and the naïve (pragmatic) accounts. One hundred nine children between 8 and 13 years old participated in an adapted task of illusory transparency. Children read a story in which a character wrote an ambiguous message to another (addressee) that could be interpreted as sarcastic, which was dependent on information known only to the writer (privileged knowledge). The reader of the message could be the addressee or an accidental reader. We asked children about the intention of the writer to be sarcastic and whether the reader interpreted it as sarcastic. Also, we asked explicitly whether the reader could have had access to the privileged knowledge. The results showed illusory transparency of intention in children, as had been shown in adults. Moreover, while attribution of sarcastic intention increased with age, the magnitude of the illusory transparency did not. The results from an explicit measure support the pragmatic account: Children attributed more capacity of knowledge to the addressee than to the accidental reader. However, the implicit (traditional) measure suggests the implication of construal operations. We propose that these results are due to the fact that information processing operates in two different ways, consistent with each approach. The developmental results are discussed.