To communicate effectively, speakers must monitor and refine their utterances based on what their interlocutors know. Young children’s use of the contrastive marker but offers a window into this ability. Using longitudinal transcripts, we examined how seven children (ages 2–5) used but to clarify messages in everyday conversations. We coded 1,446 utterances to identify clarifications addressing gaps in listener knowledge. Children rarely used but for clarification at age 2, with marked increases between ages 2 and 3. By age 3, children often used but to provide privileged information in response to adults’ knowledge-gap cues. These findings raise questions about the role of conversational experience in the development of children’s mentalising abilities.

Communication often hinges on our ability to describe and explain things clearly so others can understand them. While this ability develops throughout childhood, little is known about how it is shaped in adulthood. This gap matters, as referential communication is central to everyday social and professional interactions. This study examines how nonverbal intelligence, formal education, literacy, and theory of mind (ToM) predict referential communication performance in adults. Forty female Spanish-speaking adults in Monterrey, Mexico—20 low-SES and 20 high-SES—completed a referential communication task along with measures of reading fluency, print exposure, nonverbal IQ, and ToM (false-belief and faux-pas tasks). Results revealed that IQ, years of education, and faux-pas comprehension significantly predicted referential communication scores. Our findings suggest that referential clarity in adult speech may rely less on reading experience and more on cognitive ability, opportunities to practice referential communication, and sensitivity to social norms and intentions. We discuss the implications of these findings.

This study examined explicit mentalising (EM) in preschoolers with a history of language delay (HLD) and tested whether vocabulary mediates the association between theory of mind (ToM) and EM, after controlling for family socio-economic status (SES). Ninety Mandarin-speaking preschoolers (45 with HLD, 32 boys; 45 without HLD, 24 boys; aged 4–6 years) completed measures of cognitive and affective ToM, receptive emotional and non-emotional vocabulary, expressive emotional and non-emotional vocabulary, and EM. The results showed that participants with HLD scored lower on vocabulary, ToM, and EM than their peers without HLD. Expressive vocabulary partially mediated the ToM–EM relationship. For cognitive ToM, mediation followed a sequential path from receptive to expressive vocabulary, whereas affective ToM was mediated only by expressive vocabulary; the association of nonemotional expressive vocabulary in the cognitive pathway was attenuated after controlling for SES. EM interventions for preschoolers with HLD may benefit from targeting reasoning processes and supporting the development of emotional understanding and expression through vocabulary growth and ToM-related mechanisms.

This article argues that concepts of time are central to how armed forces imagine and pursue victory, functioning as both an ordering principle and an instrumental resource. Here, the article advances the concept of a ‘martial theory of mind’ to explain how armed forces seek to instrumentally manipulate the ordering properties of time to produce spatial and technological advantages, rooted in socio-technical imaginaries of both their own and their adversaries’ behaviour. However, technological change has frequently altered the relationship between time and space in warfare, necessitating constant alteration to prevailing military doctrines as armies update their ‘martial theory of mind’. The article then applies this theoretical lens to analyse the potential collapse of contemporary doctrines of manoeuvre warfare, highlighting how technological diffusion has undermined the relationship between time and space in the martial theory of mind underpinning their operation. It concludes by articulating a series of potential avenues by which Western armies might seek to address this growing imbalance.

In this paper, we introduce the action language C-MT (Mind Transition Language), built on top of answer set programs and transition systems to represent how human mental states evolve in response to sequences of observable actions. Drawing on well-established psychological theories, such as the Appraisal Theory of Emotion, we formalize mental states, such as emotions, as multi-dimensional configurations. To enable controlled agent behavior and limit undesirable effects such as undue psychological influence, we introduce a novel causal rule, forbids to cause, together with constructs tailored to mental state dynamics. These allow the specification of valid transitions as constraints and invariance properties, which are rigorously evaluated over trajectories in transition systems. The framework supports reasoning about and comparing different dynamics of mental change under varying constraints. We apply the action language to design models for emotion verification.

This longitudinal study monitored Theory-of-Mind development in monolingually raised but bilingually educated Spanish children (age 5–6) with varied L2-English curricula (13%–83%) to assess whether higher L2-exposure resulted in advantages on seven ToM concepts (emotion, desires, belief, reference, moral-reasoning, lies, sarcasm). Attention (selective, switching, inhibition) and a full suite of individual-difference effects were also monitored. GLMMs linked greater L2-exposure to higher ToM accuracy, and although all three attention measures contributed to ToM scores, the effect of selective attention was the strongest. L1-vocabulary and NVR routinely predicted ToM scores, and girls surpassed boys on sarcasm. We conclude that bilingualism spurs ToM development quickly and is not linked to L2-vocabulary at this stage. In addition, the fact that L2-exposure and individual differences impacted cognitive, affective, and conative ToM differentially supports an approach that analyses these components separately.

Studies persuasively show that parental power assertion contributes to children’s hostile (defensive) mindsets, but most examined severe forms of control (abuse, harsh punishment) and aggressive children. Less is known about processes linking power assertion with children’s hostile mindsets in typical, low-risk families. Further, specific mechanisms accounting for associations between parenting and hostile mindsets are unclear; children’s theory of mind (ToM) and regulation have been suggested, implying equifinality in developmental cascades. Finally, factors that moderate impact of parenting on children’s hostile mindsets, implying multifinality, are unclear. In a study of 200 mothers, fathers, and children, we proposed that links between parental power assertion and children’s hostile mindsets are (a) accounted for by two parallel mediators – children’s poor ToM and poor regulation, and (b) moderated by their representations of parents. We expected links between power assertion and hostile mindset to be significant for children with negative representations, but defused, or absent, for children with positive representations. Parental power assertion was assessed at toddler and preschool age, ToM and regulation at preschool age, and hostile mindsets and representations of parents at early school age. We supported both mediated paths for mother–child dyads, mediation via child regulation for father–child dyads, and moderation for both.

This article offers a DE SE THEORY of person indexicals, wherein first- and second-person indexical pronouns indicate REFERENCE DE SE (also called SELF-ASCRIPTION). Long observed for first-person pronouns (Castañeda 1977, Kaplan 1977, Perry 1979, inter alia), self-ascription is extended here to second person as well. The person feature of a pronoun specifies the speech-act roles that must be played by the self-ascribers: the speakers (uttering a first-person pronoun), the addressees (interpreting a second-person pronoun), or both (for first-person inclusive). Other agents who are not among the designated self-ascribers for a given pronoun interpret the pronoun indirectly by inferring the self-ascriber's interpretation, a process requiring THEORY OF MIND, that is, the cognitive ability to impute mental states to others (Premack & Woodruff 1978). This de se theory is supported by convergent evidence from multiple domains: (i) It explains a typological universal: first- and second-person plurals always allow associative semantics (‘speaker(s) plus others’, 'addressee(s) plus others') rather than requiring regular plural semantics ('speakers only', ‘addressees only‘) (Greenberg 1988, Noyer 1992, Cysouw 2003, Bobaljik 2008). (ii) It belongs to a family of approaches that solve the problem of the essential indexical (Perry 1979). (iii) It correctly predicts observed patterns of indexical pronoun production and comprehension by two populations lacking a fully developed theory of mind: typically developing children in the stage before theory of mind has developed, and children with autism. (iv) It correctly predicts the interpretation of second-person pronouns in utterances with multiple addressees.

In this commentary, we emphasize the importance of the observations presented by Kissine (2021) in his target article for our understanding of the nonmonolithic nature of pragmatics. Our first aim is to complement Kissine's argument, discussing some critical cases of linguistic processes that demonstrate the need for a finer-grained characterization of pragmatic phenomena. In addition, we report some findings that suggest that perspective taking may emerge as atypical even in autistic individuals who appear to be able to pass the standard theory-of-mind tasks. Our second aim is thus to argue that, albeit difficult to spot in experimental settings, the atypical theory-of-mind profile of low- and high-functioning autistic individuals is mirrored in their difficulties in everyday sociocommunicative interactions. Moreover, we claim that subtle differences in perspective-taking abilities may explain the highly heterogeneous linguistic profile of autistic individuals. Ultimately, with this commentary we wish to highlight the need for an increased appreciation of the role of perspective taking in typical and atypical language acquisition. This is crucial to our understanding of the nature of language acquisition, and can shed more light on the interaction between language and other aspects of human cognition.

Mikhail Kissine's (2021) target article examines autism in order to mine questions about language use and its cognitive underpinnings. Among these, we focus on the question concerning the role of mind reading in language interpretation. Kissine claims that the selective pragmatic profile of highly verbal autistic individuals undermines the existence of an ‘intrinsic link’ between language interpretation and mind reading. We advocate for a more cautious approach based on both theoretical and empirical arguments. Theoretically speaking, data from autism are compatible with the view that language interpretation is the result of a special-purpose form of mind reading, dedicated to the domain of intentional communication. Empirically speaking, the data are neither clear nor consistent enough for making strong claims about what exactly are the communicative challenges of highly verbal autistic individuals.

The power of human social cognition is typically associated with mental state reasoning—a mentalistic stance. Here, we argue humans have a second equally powerful system, an institutional stance, that interprets social interactions in terms of structured sets of roles linked to rule-like behavioral expectations. Precursors of the institutional stance in other species may support social reasoning in the absence of complex models of mental states. However, the institutional stance is unique in humans in its generative capacity, supporting the creation of a myriad range of institutional structures that shape our world and enable large-scale social coordination.