Capacity for referential communication and development of Theory of Mind

RESCHES, M.; PÉREZ PEREIRA,M

Uppsala

Conferencia; Xth European Conference on Developmental Psychology; 2001

Communicative development has been considered as the result of the interaction of three different constituents: linguistic development, cognitive development and social development (Ninio & Snow, 1996). It is obvious that for a child to be a good communicator, he needs a certain mastery of the language system: lexical and semantic knowledge, morphological knowledge, syntactic knowledge as well as pragmatic knowledge (linguistic development). He also needs a certain degree of knowledge of how things function in the word (cognitive development).In addition to this, the child also needs a certain degree of knowledge about others´ needs, intentions, desires and thoughts (social knowledge).