The Conducted Study Is An Experimental And Given Answers Were Found In The Article Research Paper Examples

Children's Understanding of the Modal Expression of Speaker Certainty and Uncertainty and its Relation to the Development of a Representational Theory of Mind
In 1989 Chris Moore, David Furrow and their associates conducted a research regarding certainty differentiation and showed that by the age of 4 children become able to recognize and understand terms in sentences which reveals degrees of certainty. Some researchers showed that children begin to use these terms in everyday speech when they are 2-3 years old. However, this does not mean that they understand them. According to Green, the process of understanding comes during the concrete operational period. The experiment that will be described in this paper was conducted by Moore, Furrow and Pure. They used modal verbs and adjuncts to express certainty in sentences.
In the first experiment they wanted to determine the development of the understanding of the use of modal terms that are used to express certainty. They used verbs must, might and could and adjuncts: probably, possibly and maybe. Each of these terms shows certain degree of certainty. Must and probably express the highest and might and maybe the lowest level of certainty. To achieve their goal they used a sample of twenty children (English native speakers) that were 3, 4, 5 and 6 years old. The children attended preschools and elementary schools in Halifax, Nova Scotia. There were both 50 % boys and girls. Two sets of trials were exhibited to every child, in which every set had 12 trials. Four of each of the three possible pair wise combinations of the above mentioned verbs and adjuncts. They presented these 12 trials in four blocks of three where every block contained one contrast. Before starting with the trials researchers wanted to be certain that children understood what their assignment is. The instruction was quite simple. Children had to find a candy that was hidden in either blue or red box with the help of two puppets.
The results showed that the process of understanding relative certainty expressed with verbs and adjuncts is developing between the age of 3 and 5. 5 and 6 year olds scored significantly higher for the must-might and the must-could contrast than the other groups. It is interesting that the group of 4 year olds had showed significantly higher understanding of could-might contrast in relation to other groups. When it comes to contrast regarding modal adjunctions, main effects for age were shown only for probably-possibly contrast and probably-maybe contrast. The results show that there is higher understanding of must-might, must-could, and probably-maybe contrasts between 3 and 4 year olds. We can also see that the performance on these three contrasts is levelling out at the age of 6, and there are significant improvements for the probably-possibly contrast.
Second experiment in this study included testing with mental and modal terms. The children had the same assignment as in the first experiment, to find the hidden candy. They also had a task to assess the understanding of hidden belief, representational change and appearance-reality. This experiment engaged 26 children (English native speakers) who were at the age of 4. Number of boys and girls was identical. Every child had 12 trials to find hidden candy and three trials for each of the tasks assessing the understanding of change, false belief and appearance-reality. The same procedure for hidden object task as in first experiment was used in this experiment. Tree trials with usage of misleading object were used in belief tasks.
The results of this experiment showed that there is a high correlation between performance with the mental and modal terms. This tells us that children of this age can understand certainty expressions. Children could also make distinction between appearance and reality and could provide answers on the basis of beliefs. Those subjects who could distinct mental and modal terms of certainty, could also make a distinction between appearance and reality.
According to researchers these results can be related to Representational theory of mind. It is a theory that provides a view that beliefs, perceptions and utterances actually represent our reality and can be misinterpreted. Children who understand this representational nature of mind are able to recognize other peoples’ false beliefs and the certainty they are held with.