Theory of Mind (ToM) is a multifaceted skill set which encompasses a variety of cognitive and neurobiological aspects. ToM deficits have long been regarded as one of the most disabling features in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder. One of the theories that attempts to account for these impairments is that of “broken mirror neurons”. The aim of this review is to present the most recent available studies with respect to the connection between the function of mirror neurons in individuals with ASD and ToM-reflecting sensorimotor, social and attentional stimuli. The majority of these studies approach the theory of broken mirror neurons critically. Only studies from the last 15 years have been taken into consideration. Findings from electroencephalography (EEG) studies so far indicate that further research is necessary to shed more light on the mechanisms underlying the connection(s) between ToM and neurophysiological operations.

The prevalence of autism worldwide has risen steadily in the last two decades, while bilingualism is also becoming increasingly prevalent in today's rapidly globalizing world. The current study aimed to investigate bilingualism effects in the pronoun resolution skills of children with autism in comparison to age‐matched monolingual children with autism, as well as monolingual and bilingual children of typical development (Ν = 20 participants per group). Results showed that autistic children had general difficulty anchoring ambiguous pronouns to entities that were linguistically expressed in discourse, yet, the bilingual children with autism were more sensitive to the topicality of the entities in syntactic subject position and more prone to identify them as suitable referents of ambiguous null pronouns as compared to their monolingual peers. The findings suggest that bilingualism is not detrimental to autistic children's pronoun resolution skills. The current study aimed at determining how bilingualism influences ambiguous pronoun comprehension in children with autism as compared to bilingual and monolingual children of typical development. The findings show that bilingualism was not detrimental to the autistic children's pronoun resolution skills, further suggesting that having acquired more than one language does not exacerbate autistic children's deficits in the comprehension of pronouns.

Despite the fact that the urge to investigate bilingualism and neurodevelopmental disorders as continuous indices rather than categorical ones has been well-voiced among researchers with respect to research methodological approaches, in the recent literature, when it comes to examining language, cognitive skills and neurodivergent characteristics, it is still the case that the most prevalent view is the categorisation of adults or children into groups. In other words, there is a categorisation of individuals, e.g., monolingual vs. bilingual children or children with typical and atypical/non-typical/non-neurotypical development. We believe that this labelling is responsible for the conflicting results that we often come across in studies. The aim of this review is to bring to the surface the importance of individual differences through the study of relevant articles conducted in bilingual children and children with autism, who are ideal for this study. We concur with researchers who already do so, and we further suggest moving away from labels and instead shift towards the view that not everything is either white or black. We provide suggestions as to how this shift could be implemented in research, while mostly aiming at starting a discourse rather than offering a definite path.

This paper presents a new toolkit for assessing Theory of Mind (ToM) via performance in first and second-order false belief (FB) tasks. The toolkit includes verbal and non-verbal versions of first and second-order FB tasks; the verbal version is currently available in Greek and German. Scenarios in the toolkit are balanced for factors that may influence performance, like the reason for the FB (deception, change-of-location, unexpected content). To validate our toolkit, we tested the performance of neurotypical adults in the non-verbal and verbal versions in two studies: Study 1 with 50 native speakers of German and Study 2 with 50 native speakers of Greek. The data from both studies yield similar results. Participants performed well in all conditions, showing slightly more difficulties in the second- than first-order FB conditions, and in the non-verbal than the verbal version of the task. This suggests that the task is at the high end of the sensitive range for neurotypical adults, and is expected to be well inside the sensitive range for children and populations that have difficulties in ToM. Factors like deception and type of outcome in the video-scenarios did not influence the behavior of neurotypical adults, suggesting that the task does not have any confounds related to these factors. The order of presentation of the verbal and non-verbal version has an influence on performance; participants beginning with the verbal version performed slightly better than participants beginning with the non-verbal version. This suggests that neurotypical adults used language to mediate ToM performance and learn from a language-mediated task when performing a non-verbal ToM task. To conclude, our results show that the scenarios in the toolkit are of comparable difficulty and can be combined freely to match demands in future research with neurotypical children and autistic individuals, as well as other populations that have been shown to have difficulties in ToM. Differences between baseline and critical conditions can be assumed to reflect ToM abilities, rather than language and task-based confounding factors.