Ricerc@Sapienza

By employing the epilinguistic and metalinguistic analysis of a corpus of responses by 170 pre-teenagers from two colleges in Abidjan and Toulouse, we will discuss, first, the concepts of acceptability, grammaticalness and utterability in order to try to determine, as far as possible, on what kind of knowledge and on what type of reasoning they rely on.

Previous research has consistently demonstrated that false-belief (FB) understanding correlates with and predicts metalinguistic ability in preschoolers. Surprisingly, however, there is scant evidence on the question of whether this relation persists at later ages. The present cross-sectional study sought to fill this gap by examining the association between FB understanding, belief-based justifications and metalinguistic awareness.