A Research On The Relationship Between Young Children's Theory Of Mind And Language

Theory of mind (ToM) is an important cognitive ability to interpret oneself and other's mind in terms of theoretical concepts of intentional states such as beliefs and desires. Since the eighties of the 20th century, ToM has become an area of much concern among developmental psychologists. As the research in this domain going deeper, the focus has changed gradually: from emphasizing the different characteristics at different ages in children' theory-of-mind development and a variety of task specifics to taking into account the relation between ToM and many potential relevant factors (e.g., language, working memory, executive function). Specifically, the relation between ToM and language has received particular attention because language provides the most explicit and unique way to think and talk about the mind.This research attempts to examine the relation between theory-of-mind and language development of monolingual Chinese-speaking children of 3- and 4-year-olds, and investigate how individual variation in child's language ability influences the mutual mechanisms. It will help us further understand the link between theory-of-mind and language ability from a developmental perspective, and provide developmental evidence of children's understanding to mind across culture. Meanwhile it can also provide us the theoretical guide on how to improve children's theory-of-mind and language competence.In the first part of this dissertation, the important previous researches on the development of children's understanding of mind and the relation between theory-of-mind and language were reviewed. Firstly, we briefly introduce the changes and development in children's understanding of the mind and classical false belief tasks, which are the focus of theory-of-mind research. Secondly, several important theoretical explanations in the field are discussed. Then a brief description of the process on children's language acquisition and hot research trends in the area are made. The core of this part gives a comprehensive review about the important empirical findings and major theoretical perspectives concerning the relation of language and theory-of-mind. The previous researches have tried to answer the following questions through evolutionary and developmental line: what is the nature of the relation between theory-of-mind and language development? Does language competence covary with theory-of-mind ability or whether there is a consequencerelationship between them? How and why do aspects of language development relate to theory-of-mind ability? Although, as this review shows, a great deal of researches in the past decades have focused on the relation between theory-of-mind and language development, there are still many questions remain to be explored. For example, there is not much information in this field about different culture and individual difference in language ability, and there should be more attention on studies which use non-verbal false belief tasks to assess children's ability of false belief understanding and which focus on how developmental advances in theory-of-mind might benefit language acquisition in the preschool years.There are four Studies in the second part of this dissertation. In Study One, we first investigated weather there is a correlation between preschooler's theory-of-mind task performance and general language ability over time and the direction of the relation; our second goal of the study is to explore links between individual variation in child's language ability and the relation. The major findings are as follows: (1) during 3.5- to 4-year-olds, monolingual Chinese-speaking children's ability to understand false-beliefs shows an obvious development: preschoolers with normal general language ability went from below-chance performance to chance performance, while those preschoolers with outstanding language ability displayed better understanding of false belief and went from chance performance to above-chance performance on the tasks; (2) there is a interaction involving gender and language ability for...