Contrast Experiment On Theory-of-Mind Development And Family Nurture Environment Of Urban And Rural Chilren Aged From 3 To 6

Oversea research on differences of children's Theory of Mind (ToM) in a culture suggest, the fact that children acquire mental concepts at different ages results from the interactions of various early social experiences, which involves the influences of parents' occupation, education background, number of siblings. Surveys suggest that differences of children's ToM in Chinese culture are mainly shown on differences between urban and rural cultural environment, particularly urban and rural family nurture environment This attributes to the special situation of China. Yet at present, there is no experimental study on the development of Chinese rural children' ToM. Therefore, this research fccused-on comparison of the development of Chinese urban and rural children's ToM and examined primarily the influence of family nurture environment In this research, 241 urban and rural children aged from 3 to 6 were tested in two ToM tasks, about 20 of the children were required to give an oral report to add supplemental explanations to the data, and finally, the children's nurturers were interviewed at home with self-created Family Basic Information Questionnaire. Analyses of all the data came to the following conclusions.First of all, the ToM development of 6 kinds of children showed an age-related change on the whole; at the same time, it was unbalanced among all the kinds. The results revealed that ToM developed significantly faster in the urban children than in the rural children. Whereas urban children rapidly acquire ToM ability at the age of 4 or so,rural children without siblings rapidly acquire this ability at the age of 5 or so and those with siblings do so at the age of 6 or so. This contradicts with the finding of similar research overseas that ToM development favors children with siblings On the other hand, no national difference was found in the development of this ability.Moreover, it was suggested in the survey on the family nurture environment of the urban and rural children that the children with better ToM were generally nurtured by their parents in person, that their nurturers received junior middle school or higher education and had an occupation with stable income, that they communicated frequently with their children every day in a equal and gamelike manner, and that those children showed more active communication in good spirits with their nurturers than inactive response to adults. The urban children mostly had the above-mentioned growing environment, so it was why ToM developed significantly faster in the urban children than in the rural children.Finally, analyzing both the results of this research and the previous theoretic models of ToM, we propose that it seems more reasonable to present a theory of "instructive social communication" to explain the ontogeny and development of ToM.