%0 Journal Article
%A Vasil, Jared
%A Moore, Charlotte
%A Tomasello, Michael
%+ Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Max Planck Society
%T Thought and language: Association of groupmindedness with young English-speaking children’s production of pronouns : 
%G eng
%U https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000D-321D-B
%R 10.1177/01427237231169398
%7 2023-05-11
%D 2023
%* Review method: peer-reviewed
%X Shared intentionality theory posits that at age 3, children expand their conception of plural agency to include 3- or more-person groups. We sought to determine whether this conceptual shift is detectable in children’s pronoun use. We report the results of a series of Bayesian hierarchical generative models fitted to 479 English-speaking children’s first-person plural, first-person singular, second-person, third-person plural, and third-person singular pronouns. As a proportion of pronouns, children used more first-person plural pronouns, only, after 3;0 compared to before. Additionally, children used more 1pp. pronouns when their mothers used more 1pp. pronouns. As a proportion of total utterances, all pronoun classes were used more often as children aged. These findings suggest that a shift in children’s social conceptualizations at age 3 is reflected in their use of 1pp. pronouns.
%J First Language
%V 43
%N 5
%& 516
%P 516 - 538
%@ 0142-72371740-2344