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Preschool children conflate pragmatic agreement and semantic truth

Children’s ability to ascribe beliefs to themselves and others has been shown to develop in the late preschool and early school years. This ability to represent, that is to think about, beliefs known to be false is described as metarepresentational development. This article extends these findings to the domain of linguistic representations by exploring how children come to judge statements as true or false of a given reality. It presents two models of judgment, one based on the pragmatics of the expression, the other on the basis of the semantics of the expression. Two studies show that when preschoolers object to what someone has said, they are disagreeing with the speaker, a pragmatic judgment, rather than judging the truth or falsity of what the speaker has said, a semantic judgment. True/false judgments are metalinguistic judgments, later acquired, suggesting a new consciousness of linguistic form.