The experimental record of the last three decades shows that children under four fail all sorts of variations on the standard false-belief task, while more recent studies reveal that infants are able to pass non-verbal versions of the task. We argue that these paradoxical results are an artefact of the type of false-belief tasks that have been used to test infants and children: whereas non-verbal designs allow infants to stay with a protagonist's perspective over a course of events, verbal designs tend to disrupt the perspective-tracking process in various ways, making it too hard for younger children to demonstrate their capacity for perspective tracking. We report three experiments that confirm this hypothesis, showing that 3-year olds can pass a suitably streamlined version of the verbal false-belief task. We conclude that young children can pass the verbal false-belief task provided they are allowed to track the protagonist's perspective without too much disruption