The influence of language on theory of mind: a training study

Abstract

This study investigated the role of language in the development of theory of mind. It was hypothesized that the acquisition of the syntactic and semantic properties of sentential complements would facilitate the development of a representational theory of mind. Sixty preschoolers who failed false belief and sentential complement pretests were randomly assigned to training on false belief, sentential complements, or relative clauses (as a control group). All the children were post-tested on a set of different theory of mind tasks, sentential complements and relative clauses. The main findings were that the group trained on sentential complements not only acquired the linguistic knowledge fostered by the training, but also significantly increased their scores on a range of theory of mind tasks. In contrast, false belief training only led to improved theory of mind scores but had no influence on language. The control group, trained on relative clauses, showed no improvement on theory of mind posttests. These findings are taken as evidence that the acquisition of sentential complements contributes to the development of theory of mind in preschoolers. KeywordsTheory of mind; Training Study; Sentential Complements; Language The Influence of Language on Theory of Mind: A Training StudyThe early acquisition of a theory of mind has become a central focus of research in developmental psychology. The child's capacity to attribute mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions, to self and others helps to make sense of and predict behavior, thus transforming understanding of social behavior (Astington & Jenkins, 1995). The roots of this cognitive capacity can be traced to the first year of life (e.g., Bretherton, McNew, & BeeghlySmith, 1981;Wellman & Lagattuta, 2000), however, throughout the early years, children become more aware of their own minds and the minds of others, as well as how to mediate between the two. Crucial changes in theory of mind understanding occur at age four when children begin to be able to accurately interpret the contents of other minds, especially belief states (Astington and Gopnik, 1991;Perner, 1991;Wellman, 1990;Wellman & Lagattuta, 2000;Wimmer & Perner, 1983). At this point, children demonstrate that they understand that the mind is a representational system, which does not simply reflect reality. Much of the emphasis of developmental research has been on this aspect of theory of mind: What brings about the changes at this stage that allow the child to understand and reason about human action in such a fundamentally new way? In this paper we focus on the role that language plays in fostering the developmental changes in theory of mind that take place at around four years of age.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Helen Tager-Flusberg, Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Boston University School of Medicine, 715 Albany Street, L-814, Boston, MA 02118-2526. Fax: 617-414-1301 htagerf@bu.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptDev Sci. Author manuscr...

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