Linguistics Seminar Talk - Hannes Rakoczy

Title: Coming to think about thoughts –developments in preschoolers’ modal and meta-cognition

Abstract: Children implicitly represent the modal status of thought very early: They imagine fictional worlds, for example, and keep imagination (of what is merely possible) and judgment (of what is real) separate. Similarly, they track their own epistemic status such as their knowledge or ignorance. But how do children, over development, come to represent the modal status of thoughts more explicitly? Here, I will report several lines of new research from our lab on children’s emerging explicit modal and meta-cognition, and on their potential relations. In the realm of modal thought, one possibility that we are currently investigating is that a, perhaps the, primordial form of modal thinking pertains to agentive modality: thinking about what one can do (rather than what may be the case). In the realm of meta-cognition, one possibility is that a, perhaps the, primordial form of meta-cognition is social: representing one’s own state of knowledge or ignorance for the sake of communicating it in social coordination and cooperation. Finally, I will report new studies that explore the developmental relations of modal and meta-cognition.