Social cognition might play a critical role in language acquisition and comprehension, as mindreading may be necessary to infer the intended meaning of linguistic expressions uttered by communicative partners. In three electrophysiological experiments, we explored the interplay between belief attribution and language comprehension of 14-month-old infants. First, we replicated our earlier finding: infants produced an N400 effect to correctly labelled objects when the labels did not match a communicative partner’s beliefs about the referents. Second, we observed no N400 when we replaced the object with another category member. Third, when we named the objects incorrectly for infants, but congruently with the partner’s false belief, we observed large N400 responses, suggesting that infants retained their own perspective in addition to that of the partner. We thus interpret the observed social N400 effect as a communicational expectancy indicator because it was contingent not on the attribution of false beliefs but on semantic expectations by both the self and the communicative partner. Additional exploratory analyses revealed an early, frontal, positive-going electrophysiological response in all three experiments, which was contingent on infants’ computing the comprehension of the social partner based on attributed beliefs.

社会认知可能在语言习得和理解中起关键作用，因为可能需要进行心智阅读来推断出交际伙伴所表达的语言表达的预期含义。在三个电生理实验中，我们探讨了14个月大婴儿的信仰归因和语言理解之间的相互作用。首先，我们重复了我们先前的发现：当标签与交流对象对被指的看法不符时，婴儿会对正确标记的对象产生N400效应。其次，当我们用另一个类别成员替换对象时，没有观察到N400。第三，当我们错误地为婴儿命名对象时，但由于伴侣的错误信念，我们观察到大量的N400响应，这表明婴儿除了伴侣之外还保留了自己的观点。因此，我们将观察到的社会N400效应解释为一种交流预期指标，因为它不是基于错误信念的归属，而是取决于自我和交流伙伴的语义预期。进一步的探索性分析显示，在所有三个实验中，早期，额叶，积极的电生理反应均取决于婴儿基于归因信念计算社交伙伴的理解力。