Labelling Improves False Belief Understanding. A Training Study

Abstract

Abstract.A total of 104 children aged between 41 and 47 months were selected to study the relationship between language and false belief understanding. Participants were assigned to four different training conditions: discourse, labelling, control (all with deceptive objects), and sentential complements (involving non-deceptive objects). Post-test results showed an improvement in children's false belief understanding in the discourse and the labelling conditions, but not in the sentential complements with non-deceptive objects or the control group. Furthermore, the most remarkable improvement in false belief understanding occurred in the labelling group. These results suggest that some types of linguistic experience promote the development of false belief understanding, provided that differing perspectives are confronted.

Theory of Mind in Children With Specific Language Impairment: A Systematic Review and Meta‐Analysis

“…The finding of this review also merits clinical consideration. Previous studies, involving TD children and children with ASD, found that ToM abilities can be improved with systematic training (e.g., Gevers, Clifford, Mager, & Boer, 2006;Lohmann & Tomasello, 2003;Sellabona et al, 2013). Similar interventions aiming to improve the ToM abilities of children with SLI may be contemplated as an adjunct to conventional language programs.…”

“…For instance, longitudinal studies on preschool children consistently found that language abilities predicted later false-belief performance, whereas false-belief performance did not predict later language abilities (Astington & Jenkins, 1999;de Villiers & Pyers, 2002;Slade & Ruffman, 2005). Likewise, from experimental training studies it emerged that merely exposing children to systematic training on linguistic tasks was sufficient to cause improvement in their false-belief performance (Lohmann & Tomasello, 2003;Sellabona et al, 2013). Further evidence is provided by the consistent finding that deaf children of deaf parents have better ToM abilities than deaf children of hearing parents (Peterson & Siegal, 2000;Schick, de Villiers, de Villiers, & Hoffmeister, 2007), thus emphasizing the importance of linguistic environment and especially parent-child communication in facilitating children's ToM development (Schick et al, 2007).…”

“…Different lines of research have, respectively, supported the importance of mental state vocabulary (e.g., Ruffman, Slade, & Crowe, 2002), sentential complements (e.g., de Villiers & Pyers, 2002), and communicative exchanges (e.g., Ontai & Thompson, 2002) in children's ToM development. Due to inconclusive results from research comparing these aspects of language, it is still uncertain if any takes precedence in influencing ToM development (e.g., Lohmann & Tomasello, 2003;Sellabona et al, 2013).…”

Why Is Theory of Mind Important for Referential Communication?

“…ToM is therefore a fundamental capacity that develops gradually from birth, and it is a crucial cognitive development that has been studied intensively in recent years. It may also be understood as a set of skills with different degrees of complexity that appear throughout development and expand our understanding of human behaviour (Serrat et al 2013 ). Several authors have studied the development of ToM in children, finding that, despite individual differences in relation to when these abilities are acquired, typically-developing children follow a similar developmental pattern, so the order of acquisition of these skills seems to be relatively stable (Wellman et al 2011 ).…”

Theory‐of‐mind during childhood: Investigating syntactic and executive contributions

“…Complements of communication verbs have been claimed to be indicative of a purer measure of complementation abilities precisely because they do not imply mental state concepts, removing this confounding variable with ToM. Studies of typically developing children showed that complementation with communication verbs is related to FB performance (de Villiers & de Villiers, 2012; de Villiers & Pyers, 2002; Durrleman & Franck, 2015; Hale & Tager‐Flusberg, 2003; Low, 2010; Ng, Cheung, & Xiao, 2010), and that complementation training improves false belief understanding (Durrleman et al, 2019; Lohmann & Tomasello, 2003; Sellabona et al, 2013). A limitation of previous studies is that CS understanding has been assessed by means of complements that were explicitly false.…”