The primary aim in this study was to investigate the short-term stability of response types across Justification responses to Second-Order False-Belief questions. I examined the responses of 12 typically developing children, aged 10 to 12 years, across 6 equivalent tasks (3 production tasks and 3 comprehension tasks) over a 3-week period. Fifty-Eight of 12 children (7 children) were unable to
... [Show full abstract] produce a justification response 25 percent of the time. Comprehension-based responses to justification questions were stable across all experimental trials. This study provides important preliminary information regarding the stability of production-based justification scores. The investigation also raises measurement issues for researchers who use production-based Theory of Mind tasks to explore the theoretical relationships between the Theory of Mind concept and social-language abilities such as perspective-taking.