Abstract
This research investigates the controversial issue of 3-year-olds’ difficulty in false
belief tasks designed to determine children’s “theory of mind”. The key question is
whether a lack of conversational awareness is a performance limitation that can explain
3-year-olds’ responses. To this end, five experiments are reported in which a total of 182
Iranian children participated. In general, the results of Experiments were consistent with
those Western research that 4-year-olds are able to succeed the standard false belief tasks.
This confirms the opinion that theory of mind develops in the same time in different
cultures regardless of their possible variety on language and cultural practices. The
results also demonstrate that the conversationally supported false belief tasks help
children to compute the correct response to false belief task. This supports the approach
that conversational awareness needs to be taken into account in any explanation of
children’s competency and performance on false belief tasks. Accordingly, 3-year-olds’
difficulty on false belief tasks is more a performance limitation than a conceptual
deficiency on their theory of mind.