The early use of first and second person pronouns has been viewed as a sign of emerging social understanding. However, it may also depend on general language development: pronouns do not appear among the first words children acquire. In addition, some languages conjugate verbs for person, and the inflections may thus show similar relations to social understanding and language as pronouns. Very few studies have examined the relations between early person reference on the one hand and both social understanding and language development on the other. The present study used data on spontaneous language transcripts and language tasks from 58 Czech-speaking children aged 30 months to examine the relations between person reference, social understanding, and general language development. Social understanding was estimated from children’s use of the mental state language (MSL). The results confirm that both MSL and general language development show unique relations to person reference with pronouns as well as verbs.

第一和第二人称代词的早期使用被视为新兴的社会理解的标志。但是，这也可能取决于一般语言的发展：代词不会出现在儿童习得的第一个单词中。另外，某些语言将人的动词缀合在一起，因此这些词变可能表现出与社会理解和代词类似的关系。很少有研究一方面考察了早期人称参考与另一方面社会理解和语言发展之间的关系。本研究使用了来自58个30个月大的捷克语儿童的自发语言成绩单和语言任务的数据，以研究人际交往，社会理解与一般语言发展之间的关系。社会理解是通过儿童对心理状态语言（MSL）的使用来估计的。结果证实，MSL和通用语言的发展都显示出与代词和动词的人称参考有独特的关系。