Referential communication abilities and theory of mind: some preliminary results

RESCHES, M.

Cambridge

Congreso; 2001 Student Research Conference and International Forum. Harvard Graduate School of Education; 2001

Generally, communicative development has been referred as the result of a triple interaction between linguistic, cognitive and social development (Ninio & Snow, 1996).This research project proposes to analyze the specific contribution of social abilities (here considered as a capacity to attribute knowledge states to others) on a particular communicative context.In the last years, the study of the origins and evolution of children´s mentalistic abilities through the Theory of Mind (ToM) model has provided important findings to understand the development of a child´s natural psychology (Perner, 1991; Baron Cohen, Tager Flusberg et al., 1994; Carruthers and Smith, 1996). In particular, such model has become a powerful empirical tool and a good theoretical framework to study the development of early social cognition(Lewis & Mitchell, 1994, Mitchell, 1997, 2000). Past research has emphasized the predictive value that preschoolers´performance in different ToM tasks might have on various pragmatic variables along a range of communicative situations (Hughes & Dunn, 1998; Sabbagh & Callanan, 1998; Slomkowsky & Dunn, 1996, Welch-Ross, 1997).This work would intend to determine the impact that ToM development might have on the type of communicative resources children apply in a referential communication situation.