Young Children’s Meta-Ignorance

Abstract

Meta-ignorance is an awareness of one’s own knowledge or lack of knowledge. The goal of this dissertation is to examine the development of children’s meta-ignorance between 14 months and 42 months. I examine the hypothesis that children have some awareness of their own epistemic states, notably states of knowledge and ignorance. In Study 1, eight children’s use of the mental verb know was examined when they were between 18 and 36 months. Children (from the Child Language Data Exchange System) used know to affirm their own knowledge and that of their interlocutor. When they used know in the context of asking a question, they typically asked about their interlocutor’s knowledge states and not their own. Conversely, they often denied their own knowledge but rarely their interlocutor’s. Finally, they rarely referred to a third party’s knowledge. In Study 2, 64 children’s production of the flip gesture (hold two hands palm up out to the side to communicate “I don’t know”) was examined when they were between 14 and 42 months. The video recordings were from the Language Development Project. Flip gestures were observed at 14 months, which is four months before a minority of children were first observed saying: “I don’t know.” Children often flipped following their interlocutors’ comments and questions, suggesting that children used flips in a dialogic fashion. When children flipped, their interlocutors often interpreted flips as an expression of ignorance and responded accordingly. Study 3 involved an experiment in which 52 children aged 16 to 37 months were presented with familiar and unfamiliar pictures and asked to label them. For familiar pictures, children mostly produced the correct name. For unfamiliar pictures, children were more likely to display signs of uncertainty, including turning to gaze at an adult, producing a filled pause such as Um, asking for help, and saying I don’t know. Children’s ability to produce I DON’T KNOW flips, to say I don’t know, and to express uncertainty when asked to name unfamiliar objects indicates that they come to express a simple understanding of knowledge and ignorance in the course of the second and third year.