ABSTRACT

Understanding that people’s ideas may be false is a challenging step in Theory of Mind (ToM) development, which is accomplished around the age of 4–5 years old by typically developing (TD) children. False-belief attribution remains difficult beyond this age for certain clinical populations, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), where delays in this realm are significant, and Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), where delays tend to be subtler. Research has identified links between ToM success and language skills, in particular complement clauses such as John thought/said that aliens landed in his garden, in TD, as well as in ASD and DLD. It has been hypothesized that these structures serve as tools for representing subjective truths. This article reports results from our experimental work further examining the link between complementation and ToM. Study 1 investigates if complements have a more privileged influence on ToM in ASD and TD children than abilities such as Executive Functions, which arguably also play a role. Study 2 determines if complementation skills in ASD support ToM reasoning or are merely implied in ToM task performance. Study 3 extends the evaluation of complementation in ToM reasoning to DLD and explores whether clinical groups of different etiologies—ASD and DLD—perform comparably for ToM once they have similar complementation skills, as expected by a linguistic determinism approach. Study 4 addresses speculation that complementation training may not be efficient to trigger improved ToM in instances of ToM impairments by empirically testing whether training on complements via a newly created iPad application can be useful for ToM remediation in both ASD and DLD. Taken together, this body of work both enhances our theoretical understanding of the language-cognition interface as well as widens our repertoire of clinical tools addressing difficulties in this domain.

摘要

理解人们的想法可能是错误的，这是心智理论（ToM）发展中具有挑战性的一步，这是在大约4-5岁时通过典型地发育（TD）的孩子实现的。对于某些临床人群而言，超过这个年龄段的虚假信仰归因仍然很困难，例如自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）（该领域的延迟时间很长）和发育语言障碍（DLD）的情况下，延迟往往会更小。研究已经确定了ToM成功与语言技能之间的联系，特别是补充条款，例如John认为/说外星人降落在他的花园中，TD，ASD和DLD中。据推测，这些结构充当了代表主观真理的工具。本文报告了我们实验工作的结果，进一步研究了互补与ToM之间的联系。研究1研究了补语对ASD和TD儿童的ToM是否具有比执行功能这样的功能更具特权的影响，例如执行功能。研究2确定ASD中的补充技能是支持ToM推理还是仅隐含在ToM任务执行中。研究3将ToM推理中互补性的评估扩展到DLD，并探讨了不同病因的临床组（ASD和DLD）一旦具有相似的互补技能，就可以像语言确定论方法所期望的那样对ToM表现出可比性。研究4解决了这样的猜测，即通过经验测试通过新创建的iPad应用程序对补体进行的培训对于ASD和DLD中的ToM修复是否有用，补充训练在ToM损伤实例中可能无法有效地触发改善的ToM。总体而言，这项工作既增进了我们对语言认知界面的理论理解，又扩大了我们解决这一领域难题的临床工具的范围。