Children’s understanding of pretend emotions: The role of the vocabulary and the syntax of complementation with cognitive and communicative verbs

This work aims to study the role of the vocabulary and the syntax of complementation on a specific aspect of the theory of mind: children’s ability to distinguish between real and pretend emotions. The following tasks were individually administered to a total of seventy children (thirty-seven four-year-olds and thirty-three six-year-olds): a sentential complement sentences task, a task of understanding pretend actions, two tasks of understanding pretend emotions (in oneself and in others), and a receptive vocabulary test. The results showed significant correlations between the ability to understand pretend emotions and both the vocabulary and the syntax of complementation, but only in four-year-olds. Although pretend emotion understanding was found to be more tied to the syntax of complementation than to vocabulary, this type of syntax was not a necessary or sufficient condition for understanding pretend emotions. The results are discussed in the light of the importance of the links between language and understanding emotions.