engleski

How do children use language to express desires? Preliminary data on a Croatian sample

Introduction: Theory of mind requires awareness of other people’ s mental states – desires, beliefs, intentions and emotions – that are reveled largely through conversation. Therefore, majority of research on children’ s concept of desire makes use of language as its primary means of assessment. The first major work on the development of the concept of desire was done by Bartsch and Wellman (1995) with English speaking children. They concentrated on mental state verbs and showed that 97% of utterances that used any of the desire verbs they coded were accounted by the verb ‘ want’ . Similarly, Ferres (2003) found that Spanish also has a single term that accounts for most occurrences of lexical items associated with the identification of mental state of desire – the verb ‘ querer’ . To the best of our knowledge, there have not been many efforts to replicate their research in other languages. As a first step in research of mental state language in Croatian, the objective of our study was to define all the linguistic means and terms children use for referring to desires. Method: The study was based on speech utterances from three Croatian children, aged 10, 6 to 39 months, collected in the CHILDES database (McWhinney, 2000 ; Kovačević, 2003). Two independent coders analyzed 36809 speech utterances in order to define linguistic means and terms children use for referring to mental states in Croatian. The percentage of agreement regarding these references between the coders was 89, 3% and 4218 references for which the coders agreed they represented reference to mental state and/or mental state term were included in the final analysis. Results: From the total of 4218 uses of mental state expressions, 3561 referred to desires.

language; desires

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