The development of desire language: A corpus study of ‘want’

Children’s usage of mental state verbs can reveal evidence of their theory of mind and general cognitive development. Children produce a certain class of mental state verbs, namely desire verbs such as want, like, and love, early in development. Among these desire verbs, they produce want the most frequently. We report on a corpus study of 450 + instances of want as gathered from children’s dialogues with caretakers in the CHILDES database. We developed a novel coding scheme to measure children’s use and understanding of want utterances: i.e., we analyzed the kinds of things that children described wanting for themselves or others, as well as the agents to whom they ascribed desires. We report on the frequencies of these features across the ages of 24 to 59 months (2–4 years of age), and highlight noteworthy trends in the way children used want. Children appear to talk about their own desires most often; they primarily use questions to talk about second person desires; and they describe more complex desires as they mature. We describe how these patterns of linguistic competency may serve as an index for the development of mechanisms that underlie mental state reasoning.