Siriattakul Parinya, Suttiwan Panrapee, Slaughter Virginia, Peterson Candida C
Chulalongkorn University, Thailand.
University of Queensland, Australia.
J Deaf Stud Deaf Educ. 2021 Mar 17;26(2):241-250. doi: 10.1093/deafed/enaa036.
This study explored theory of mind (ToM) development in school-aged deaf children. To address new questions, we gave a standard, well-controlled false-belief test to a large (n = 200) sample of severely-to-profoundly deaf children aged 8-15 years in a non-Western culture (Thailand). There were 190 deaf children of hearing parents and 10 deaf native signers with signing deaf parents, consistent with overall population ratios. Comparing our Thai sample's ToM performance on standard tests of false-belief understanding with that reported in past studies, our results showed a 67% ToM success rate for Thai severely-to-profoundly deaf children of hearing parents similar to collective findings from past research on smaller samples in Australia, Estonia, France, Great Britain, Sweden, and the United States. Our Thai deaf native signers likewise performed equivalently to native signers of similar age studied in past research in Australia and the United States. Collectively, the detailed findings of our study suggest promising new directions for future studies to pursue in order to build upon this novel and theoretically provocative evidence about how ToM development and ToM delay unfold for school-aged deaf children growing up in varied cultures, school settings, and family circumstances.
本研究探讨了学龄期失聪儿童的心理理论（ToM）发展情况。为解决新问题，我们在非西方文化背景（泰国）下，对一大群（n = 200）年龄在8至15岁的重度至极重度失聪儿童进行了一项标准的、控制良好的错误信念测试。其中有190名失聪儿童的父母听力正常，10名失聪儿童的父母是使用手语的聋人，这与总体人口比例一致。将我们泰国样本在错误信念理解标准测试中的ToM表现与以往研究报告的结果进行比较，我们的结果显示，父母听力正常的泰国重度至极重度失聪儿童的ToM成功率为67%，这与过去在澳大利亚、爱沙尼亚、法国、英国、瑞典和美国对较小样本的研究结果相似。我们泰国的失聪手语使用者的表现同样与过去在澳大利亚和美国研究的同龄失聪手语使用者相当。总体而言，我们研究的详细结果为未来的研究提出了有前景的新方向，以便基于这些关于不同文化、学校环境和家庭环境中成长的学龄期失聪儿童ToM发展和ToM延迟如何展开的新颖且具有理论启发性的证据进行进一步研究。
