Humans can attribute mental states to others, a capacity known as Theory of
Mind. However, it is unknown to what extent this ability results from an innate
biological endowment or from experience accrued through child development,
particularly exposure to language describing others' mental states. We test the
viability of the language exposure hypothesis by assessing whether models
exposed to large quantities of human language develop evidence of Theory of
Mind. In pre-registered analyses, we present a linguistic version of the False
Belief Task, widely used to assess Theory of Mind, to both human participants
and a state-of-the-art Large Language Model, GPT-3. Both are sensitive to
others' beliefs, but while the language model significantly exceeds chance
behavior, it does not perform as well as the humans, nor does it explain the
full extent of their behavior -- despite being exposed to more language than a
human would in a lifetime. This suggests that while statistical learning from
language exposure may in part explain how humans develop Theory of Mind, other
mechanisms are also responsible.

通过评估大量语言暴露对理解心灵理论的影响，发现语言的统计学学习能够部分解释人类认知发展中心灵理论的发展，但是其他机制也起到重要作用，因为最先进的语言模型 GPT-3 尽管暴露于更多的语言环境下，但其表现并不能完全解释人类的行为