智力残疾儿童和青少年的心理理论与语言能力之间的关系。

Relationship between theory of mind and language ability in children and adolescents with intellectual disability.

作者信息

Abbeduto L, Short-Meyerson K, Benson G, Dolish J

机构信息

University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Oshkosh, WI 53705, USA.

出版信息

J Intellect Disabil Res. 2004 Feb;48(Pt 2):150-9. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2788.2004.00524.x.

DOI:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2004.00524.x

PMID:14723657

Abstract

BACKGROUND

The present study was designed to evaluate the validity of the false belief task as a measure of theory of mind development in individuals with intellectual disability (ID). In most if it variants, the false belief task is linguistically demanding. This raises the possibility that the finding that individuals with ID do poorly on it might reflect language difficulties rather than theory of mind difficulties. Complicating matters further, however, is the fact that there are theoretical reasons to suppose that there might be a relationship between some dimensions of language ability and theory of mind development in individuals with ID (as well as in other populations).

METHOD

In the present study, children and adolescents with ID and typically developing (non-verbal) mental age matches completed a standard false belief task and several tasks designed to measure language ability.

RESULTS

We reasoned that a pattern in which false belief performance was correlated with all measures of language ability would reflect an artefactual relationship, whereas a more highly circumscribed, theoretically sensible pattern of correlations that was similar across both groups would support the validity of the false belief task.

CONCLUSIONS

The results indicated that for individuals with ID who have limited narrative language skills, those limitations contribute substantially to their failure on the false belief task. For individuals with ID who have more highly developed narrative language skills (about 40% of the sample tested), however, the false belief task may provide a valid measure of their progress towards acquiring an adequate theory of mind. This latter conclusion was suggested by the fact screening out individuals who failed to meet linguistic and cognitive prerequisites for dealing with the performance demands of the false belief task yielded non-significant correlations between false belief performance and the language measures for both the group with ID and the typically developing comparison group.

摘要

背景

本研究旨在评估错误信念任务作为衡量智力残疾（ID）个体心理理论发展的有效性。在其大多数变体中，错误信念任务对语言要求较高。这就增加了一种可能性，即ID个体在该任务上表现不佳的发现可能反映的是语言困难而非心理理论困难。然而，更复杂的是，有理论依据推测，ID个体（以及其他人群）的某些语言能力维度与心理理论发展之间可能存在关联。

方法

在本研究中，患有ID的儿童和青少年以及发育正常（非言语）且心理年龄匹配的个体完成了一项标准错误信念任务和几项旨在测量语言能力的任务。

结果

我们推断，错误信念表现与所有语言能力测量指标都相关的模式将反映一种人为的关系，而在两组中都相似的、更具局限性且在理论上合理的相关模式将支持错误信念任务的有效性。

结论

结果表明，对于叙事语言技能有限的ID个体，这些限制在很大程度上导致了他们在错误信念任务上的失败。然而，对于叙事语言技能发展较好的ID个体（约占测试样本的40%），错误信念任务可能是衡量他们在获得适当心理理论方面进展的有效指标。后一个结论是由以下事实得出的：筛选出未满足处理错误信念任务表现要求的语言和认知前提条件的个体后，ID组和发育正常的对照组在错误信念表现和语言测量指标之间均无显著相关性。