Sentential complements and false belief understanding in Chinese Mandarin-speaking preschoolers: A training study

• We trained Mandarin-speaking Chinese children with poor false belief performance under four conditions.
• Children trained with sentential complement with communication verbs and false representation performed significantly better on false-belief post-tests than those in control group.
• Children in the false representation training group did not show concomitant improvements in the sentential complement tests.
• Explicit false belief understanding can emerge even when children have little competence with sentential complement constructions.

We conducted a training study to better understand how Chinese Mandarin-speaking preschoolers’ facility with sentential complement grammatical constructions affects performance on false belief tasks. Eighty-four Mandarin-speaking Chinese 3–4-year-olds who were initially unsuccessful on false belief tasks were randomly assigned to four training conditions. Two involved training on sentential complement structures, one involved training on understanding of false representations, and one was a control condition that involved no specific training. Participants who received training on sentential complements with communication verbs performed significantly better on false belief posttests than those in the control group. Children in the false representation training group did not show improvement in the sentential complement tests. The findings suggest facility with sentential complement grammatical structures can promote false belief reasoning. However, explicit false belief understanding can emerge even when children have little competence with sentential complement constructions.