Abstract
In the Idea Swap for Word of Mouth 24:3, I provided a table that documents the development of affective and cognitive theory of mind (ToM) and a list of articles that provide tasks to assess these two types of ToM. Research has documented a strong relationship between language and cognitive ToM, particularly comprehension of false belief (De Villiers & Pyers, 2002; Tager-Flusberg & Joseph, 2005). Children typically do not pass false beliefs tasks until after they have acquired mental verbs with sentential complements (e.g., Little Red Riding Hood believes that grandma is sleeping in bed). At the 2012 American Speech-Language-Hearing Convention, Mary Wilson, CEO of Laureate Learning Systems, a company that designs software to promote language development in children, suggested a progression of prerequisite language skills that could be used to guide intervention for children with deficits in ToM. She is developing a series of Laureate computer programs to systematically teach the syntax underlying ToM. These programs will provide a systematic way to teach the syntactic language skills underlying ToM, but speech-language pathologists can develop their own methods for assessing and developing these skills in their clients by following the following sequence:
Verbs of perception (hear, see, smell, taste, feel) in various contexts. Children must distinguish between actions and perceptions, thus learning the difference between observable events and internal ones. They must understand that persons can see, hear, smell, taste, and feel and they must understand the situations in which one can experience each of these perceptions. For example, they can only see if they are looking at something. One cannot see if one is wearing a blindfold or if one is not facing an object. Children must also discriminate between the senses, learning to interpret others’ differing perceptions and distinguish between a character who is and who is not experiencing a particular perception.
Who is listening? Who is touching the fruit? Who is tasting the fruit? Who is not tasting the fruit?
2. Verbs of intention/desire (want, need, like, desire, hate). The verbs want and need are among the earliest developing verbs that can take an irrealis complement, that is, a complement that refers to that which is currently not so, not happening, or absent. With these verbs, one can begin to help children understand that different people have different wants, needs, likes, and so on.
Who wants to eat? Who doesn’t want to eat?
3. Verbs of communication (e.g., say, tell, ask) with sentential complements. Verbs of communication can be used to demonstrate the syntax of sentential complements using concrete content without the added cognitive burden of inference or irrealis references (as with cognitive verbs like think and know). They can also be used to provide explicit evidence that a sentential complement can be false (when “what was said” is known to be false) even though the sentence taken as a whole is true (e.g., Linda said the moon is made of green cheese). Tager-Flusberg and Joseph (2005) have suggested that children with autism may rely more heavily on verbs of communication (e.g., what was said overtly) as a way to understand what is in other people’s minds.
4. Verbs of cognition (e.g., know, don’t know, think, believe, guess, remember, forget) with sentential complements. These structures are late developing, probably because the knowledge, beliefs, and ideas to which these verbs relate are not readily apparent. Their referents must be inferred from behaviors that may not be explainable on the basis of the context alone. One would want to be certain that children understand verbs of cognition before moving on to activities involving false beliefs.
Who knows what is in the box? Who doesn’t know what is in the box?
5. Verbs of cognition with complements that are false (Michael thinks there’s a unicorn in the yard).