Processing and comprehension of belief questions in Japanese

Abstract

This study investigated the processing and comprehension of thought questions typically used in the Japanese false-belief task. Word order variation in Japanese may affect processing and comprehension of thought questions, but there is no standardization for Japanese thought questions used in the false-belief task that examines children’s development of Theory of Mind. In this study, 30 adult participants were tested on five types of thought questions in an off-line judgment task and an on-line self-paced reading task. The results showed that there are indeed some differences in comprehension difficulties depending on word order for questions that express the same meaning. These results are discussed with regard to the syntactic properties of the question types and its implications for the assessment of children on the false-belief task.