Does syntax play a role in Theory of Mind development before the age of 3 years?

Kaltefleiter, Larissa J.; Sodian, Beate; Kristen, Susanne; Wiesmann, Charlotte Grosse; Schuwerk, Tobias

doi:10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101575

Cited by 10 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…Similar arguments can be made about syntax. Children’s grasp of theory of mind (the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others) is intimately linked with language development and, in particular, the acquisition of complex syntax (for a recent overview, see Kaltefleiter et al, 2021). This makes sense.…”

Section: Beyond Language and Literacymentioning

confidence: 99%

Book Language and Its Implications for Children’s Language, Literacy, and Development

Nation

Dawson

Hsiao

2022

Curr Dir Psychol Sci

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The onset of literacy marks a significant change in children’s development. Written language is more complex than everyday conversation, and even books targeted at preschoolers contain more varied words and more complex syntax than child-directed speech does. We review the nature and content of children’s book language, focusing on recent large-scale corpus analyses that systematically compared written and spoken language. We argue that exposure to book language provides opportunities for learning words and syntactic constructions that are only rarely encountered in speech and that, in turn, this rich experience drives further developments in language and literacy. Moreover, we speculate that the range, variety, depth, and sophistication of book language provide key input that promotes children’s social and emotional development. Becoming literate changes things, and researchers need to better understand how and why reading experience shapes people’s minds and becomes associated with a range of skills and abilities across the life span.

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Section: Beyond Language and Literacymentioning

confidence: 99%

Book Language and Its Implications for Children’s Language, Literacy, and Development

Nation

Dawson

Hsiao

2022

Curr Dir Psychol Sci

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“…It is interesting that the complement syntax showed no predictive effect in determining success in the FBU task. Previous studies have shown a significant link between these two factors in both TD children (Mo et al, 2014;Kaltefleiter et al, 2021) and autistic children (Li & Leung, 2020;Durrleman et al, 2017). One possible reason for this is the methodological differences between these studies.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…To the best of our knowledge, however, no study has investigated the relationship between the comprehension of the factuality of mental verb and their ToM ability in autistic children. Although Li and Leung (2020) found that Mandarin‐speaking autistic children who were equipped with better FBU ability performed well in a task of counterfactive verb comprehension (jia3zhuang1, ‘pretend’), the authors did not exclude the influence of children's complement syntax ability, which was proven to facilitate performance in ToM tasks in several studies (Mo et al., 2014; Kaltefleiter et al., 2021; Durrleman et al., 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the current study, we investigated the relationship between the comprehension of verb factuality and ToM ability in autistic children. Previous studies have controlled children's ability to comprehend complement syntax by adopting a sentence repetition paradigm (Grosse Wiesmann et al., 2017; Kaltefleiter et al., 2021). However, this design may not elucidate whether verb factuality shows an additional role in ToM ability.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The link between the factuality of verb and the theory of mind ability of Mandarin‐speaking children with high‐functioning autism

Cheng

Liang

2023

Intl J Lang & Comm Disor

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BackgroundWeak theory of mind (ToM) ability is a core deficit in children with autism. A growing body of work has found that there is a close relation between complement syntax and ToM in autistic children. However, researchers have not yet investigated whether other linguistic components may explain the difficulties in ToM reasoning in autistic children.AimsTo determine whether verb factuality (i.e., mental and action verbs) is related to ToM ability, as measured by a false belief understanding (FBU) task after controlling the effect of complement syntax for Mandarin‐speaking autistic children.Methods & ProceduresParticipants were verbal autistic children, aged 4–7 years. Their IQ performance (verbal, performance and total IQ) and the comprehension of complement syntax were evaluated. A total of 38 children scoring over 9 points in complement syntax test and 90 points in the verbal IQ test were selected to complete verb factuality and FBU task. The χ2 tests and correlation analyses were carried out on two relations: (1) ToM ability and understanding of verb factuality; and (2) ToM ability and comprehension of complement syntax.Outcomes & ResultsA total of 11 autistic children completed the action verb factuality task, while 14 completed the mental verb factuality task and 13 completed both tasks. Participants performed well on the verb factuality task, and their ToM performance appeared to be related to their linguistic ability, regardless of the type of verb (i.e., action or mental verb). However, complement syntax scores did not significantly predict the success of the FBU task for the autistic children.Conclusions & ImplicationsThe results of this study link weaker ToM ability with the understanding of verb factuality among autistic children aged 4–7 and provide new evidence for the view that the development of language facilitates improvement of ToM skills. The findings shed new light on how language affects or determines social interactions.WHAT THIS PAPER ADDSWhat is already known on the subject ToM ability is crucial for social interaction. It has been claimed that mental verb factuality (e.g., think, had thought) may play a role in the development of ToM reasoning in typically developing children, but whether there is a link between the mastery of verb factuality and ToM skills in autistic children is still unclear.What this study adds to existing knowledge Correlational analysis revealed links between verbal ToM measured by unexpected location task and factuality test of mental verbs as well as action verbs. More importantly, this study confirmed the extra role of verb factuality in explaining ToM ability after excluding the influence of the complement syntax.What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? This study suggests that the factuality of verbs could serve as a tool for autistic children to infer the mental states of others. Thus, training on this linguistic structure could be taken into consideration when improving the social skills of autistic children.

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“…Another recent study suggests that children's sensitivity to syntactic features of complement‐clause constructions could be related to socio‐cognitive precursors of false‐belief understanding. In a longitudinal study, Kaltefleiter, Sodian, Kristen‐Antonow, Grosse Wiesmann, and Schuwerk (2021) found that German‐speaking children who were able to repeat or revert to the right word order in the complement clause (i.e., verb‐final for complement clauses with a that complementizer and verb‐second for complement clauses without a that complementizer) were also better at perspective‐taking and understanding ignorance 3 months later. What we do not know yet is whether more implicit tests of language (including complement clauses) also show a relation to implicit tests of false belief.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Putting Complement Clauses into Context: Testing the Effects of Story Context, False‐Belief Understanding, and Syntactic form on Children's and Adults’ Comprehension and Production of Complement Clauses

2023

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A key factor that affects whether and at what age children can demonstrate an understanding of false belief and complement‐clause constructions is the type of task used (whether it is implicit/indirect or explicit/direct). In the current study, we investigate, in an implicit/indirect way, whether children understand that a story character's belief can be true or false, and whether this understanding affects children's choice of linguistic structure to describe the character's belief or to explain the character's belief‐based action. We also measured children's understanding of false belief in explicit false‐belief tasks. English‐ and German‐speaking young 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds as well as English‐ and German‐speaking adult controls heard complement‐clause constructions in a story context where the belief mentioned in the complement clause (e.g., “He thinks that she's not feeling well”) turned out to be false, true, or was left open. After hearing the test question (“Why does he not play with her?”), all age groups were most likely to repeat the whole complement‐clause construction when the belief turned out to be false. That is, they tended to explicitly refer to the character's perspective and say “He thinks…” When the belief turned out to be true, participants often reverted to a simple clause (“She's not feeling well”). Furthermore, children with better short‐term memory were more likely to repeat the whole complement‐clause construction. However, children's performance in explicit false‐belief tasks showed no relation to their performance in our novel, more implicit/indirect, task. Whether or not the complement clause was introduced by a that complementizer only had a small effect on the German adults’ responses, where leaving out the complementizer also changes the word order of the complement clause. Overall, our results suggest that task characteristics and individual differences in short‐term memory affect children's ability to demonstrate false‐belief understanding and to express this understanding linguistically.

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Does syntax play a role in Theory of Mind development before the age of 3 years?

Cited by 10 publications

References 62 publications

Book Language and Its Implications for Children’s Language, Literacy, and Development

Book Language and Its Implications for Children’s Language, Literacy, and Development

The link between the factuality of verb and the theory of mind ability of Mandarin‐speaking children with high‐functioning autism

Putting Complement Clauses into Context: Testing the Effects of Story Context, False‐Belief Understanding, and Syntactic form on Children's and Adults’ Comprehension and Production of Complement Clauses

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