This investigation examined whether access to sign language as a medium for instruction influences theory of mind (ToM) reasoning in deaf children with similar home language environments. Experiment 1 involved 97 deaf Italian children ages 4-12 years: 56 were from deaf families and had LIS (Italian Sign Language) as their native language, and 41 had acquired LIS as late signers following contact with signers outside their hearing families. Children receiving bimodal/bilingual instruction in LIS together with Sign-Supported and spoken Italian significantly outperformed children in oralist schools in which communication was in Italian and often relied on lipreading. Experiment 2 involved 61 deaf children in Estonia and Sweden ages 6-16 years. On a wide variety of ToM tasks, bilingually instructed native signers in Estonian Sign Language and spoken Estonian succeeded at a level similar to age-matched hearing children. They outperformed bilingually instructed late signers and native signers attending oralist schools. Particularly for native signers, access to sign language in a bilingual environment may facilitate conversational exchanges that promote the expression of ToM by enabling children to monitor others' mental states effectively.

We investigated whether access to a sign language affects the development of pragmatic competence in three groups of deaf children aged 6 to 11 years: native signers from deaf families receiving bimodal/bilingual instruction, native signers from deaf families receiving oralist instruction and late signers from hearing families receiving oralist instruction. The performance of these children was compared to a group of hearing children aged 6 to 7 years on a test designed to assess sensitivity to violations of conversational maxims. Native signers with bimodal/bilingual instruction were as able as the hearing children to detect violations that concern truthfulness (Maxim of Quality) and relevance (Maxim of Relation). On items involving these maxims, they outperformed both the late signers and native signers attending oralist schools. These results dovetail with previous findings on mindreading in deaf children and underscore the role of early conversational experience and instructional setting in the development of pragmatics.

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