Abstract Prior work shows that theory of mind (ToM), typically assessed with false belief understanding (FBU) tasks, predicts reading comprehension in school-aged children. This paper extends this research by examining the link in preschool-aged children in an exploratory study. We examined associations among FBU and several aspects of narrative abilities (story comprehension, picture sequencing, inferences generated in a narrative task, and goal-directed narratives) in a six-month longitudinal study. We found that FBU was related to all narrative abilities within Time 1 and with inferencing within Time 2. There were also cross-lagged associations between FBU and inferencing between Time 1 and 2. However, only goal-directed narratives were significantly related to FBU after controlling for child age and language. Interestingly, a factor analysis demonstrated that FBU and all narrative abilities but picture sequencing loaded onto a single factor. This study suggests that FBU and narrative abilities may overlap during the preschool years rather than representing distinct constructs. It also suggests that during the preschool years, narrative production rather than narrative comprehension may be more strongly linked to FBU as both the inference and goal-directed narrative tasks were derived from children’s oral narratives.

中文翻译：

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学龄前错误信念理解与叙事理解

摘要 先前的工作表明，心理理论 (ToM) 通常用错误信念理解 (FBU) 任务进行评估，可以预测学龄儿童的阅读理解能力。本文通过在一项探索性研究中检查学龄前儿童之间的联系来扩展这项研究。在为期六个月的纵向研究中，我们检查了 FBU 与叙事能力的几个方面（故事理解、图片排序、叙事任务中产生的推理和目标导向的叙事）之间的关联。我们发现 FBU 与时间 1 内的所有叙事能力和时间 2 内的推理相关。FBU 与时间 1 和时间 2 之间的推理之间也存在交叉滞后关联。然而，只有目标导向的叙事与 FBU 显着相关控制孩子的年龄和语言。有趣的是，因子分析表明 FBU 和所有叙事能力，但图片排序加载到一个单一的因素。这项研究表明，FBU 和叙事能力在学龄前可能会重叠，而不是代表不同的结构。它还表明，在学龄前期间，由于推理和目标导向的叙事任务都源自儿童的口头叙事，因此叙事生产而不是叙事理解可能与 FBU 有更密切的联系。