Does learning another language
matter for Theory of Mind?
-Young Children’s Bilingualism and Theory of
Mind Development
Student ID NO. 1320299
Content
Abstract .………. 4
Introduction ………... 6
Methods ……….. 27
Result ……….. 36
Discussion ……….. 47
Reference ... 62
Abstract
Previous research had established the close relation between metalinguistic awareness and Theory of Mind development. Most of these studies focused on children’s phonological, syntactic and semantic awareness and their relation with false belief task performances. However, the metalinguistic tasks often suffered from the complication of executive functioning. Criticism claimed that the results of these tasks failed to reflect children’s metalinguistic ability purely. In the current study which pursued a similar research question, levels of bilingualism were used as the medium between Theory of Mind development and metalinguistic awareness development, without involving metalinguistic tasks. Moreover, the study intended to investigate the effect direction of secondary language acquisition and the pattern of it on first language proficiency.
Three groups of children aged between 3-7 years were recruited for this study, including 10 British monolinguals, 8 Chinese children adopted by British families, and 9 Chinese children living with their biological parents in Britain. Their English language proficiency was measure with Test for Early Language Development-3. Theory of mind tasks included an unexpected transfer task, an unexpected content task and a Droodle task.
Introduction
Children, especially young children, perceive the world differently from adults in many ways. From how they see the spatial position of objects (Piaget & Inhelder, 1948 & 1956), to how they understand others’ beliefs and intentions (Baron-Cohen, 1991), children experience many cognitive and conceptual changes before reaching adulthood. One topic of particular interest among these areas is referred to as Theory of Mind. The definition of Theory of Mind has been diverse and rather debatable among those who do human research. How the term first entered the developmental literature has two possible routes. Wellman (1979, 1985) initially employed this term to refer to a child’s conception of human cognition in his work on metacognition. On the other hand animal’s capability of attributing knowledge and mental states to others was also referred to as Theory of mind in behavioural research on chimpanzees (Premack & Woodruff, 1978).
predictions. Of course, there have been some researchers who are reluctant to use this term and even deny that children develop any theory about mind or mental states (Hobson, 1991). However, in the past twenty years, both the research interest and effort in Theory of Mind development have had significant growth. Theory of Mind is now used to refer to three phenomena- a cognitive structure leading to certain abilities, an area of research investigating these abilities, and a theoretical perspective explaining this development (Akingston & Baird, 2005).The fact that Theory of Mind invokes such a great field of concepts and phenomena, including the cognitive structure, the theories explaining the mechanism of this structure and what this structure implies, contributes to the diverse academic opinions to a great extent. Therefore it is worthwhile refining the use of Theory of Mind in this study as follows: a cognitive structure which allows one to develop concepts of others’ action and interaction and thus infer their intentions and predict actions. In other words, having acquired Theory of Mind, one should be able to understand with good reasoning that people have different mental states, and that their actions are affected by these mental states.
required children to conceptualise the spatial relationship between objects and produce answers accordingly. The emergence of Theory of Mind had been dismissed as a form of ‘cognitive escape from Egocentrism’ (Doherty, 2006). Piaget’s testing methods had been criticised for the demanding task setups and the consequential underestimation of test performance (Doherty, 2006). It is now generally agreed that children develop, or show signs of development of Theory of Mind between the ages of 4 and 5 years (Perner, 1991).
Examining children’s Theory of Mind development often involves tasks requiring children to consider the situations where others hold different mental states from theirs or where there is a conflict between belief and reality. One of the first standardised tests to examine children’s acquisition of Theory of Mind was the false-belief task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). False-false-belief tasks come in many forms and modifications. The most popular ones are change-of-location task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983), unexpected identity task (Gopnik & Astington, 1988) and appearance-reality task (Flavell, 1986). Typically, the tested child would be told a story where one character is deceived with some information, for example, the location of a toy, the true object concealed in a box, or telling a lie in the case of secondary false belief (Doherty, 2006). The tested child would then need to make inference of a character’s response to certain questions according to how much knowledge of truth the characters have. Passing such tasks indicates the ability to understand mental states and the possibility of belief–reality conflict.
studies all revealed the strong correlation between language competence and Theory of Mind development. While the relationship is undoubtedly evident, many debate the interpretation of such a relationship. First, language competence and Theory of Mind generally develop with age. The positive correlation may be merely the evidence of age as the mutual factor. Secondly, false-belief tasks are quite often verbal tasks and good performance demands high language competence from children, which does not independently reflect children’s understanding to false belief (Bloom & German, 2000).
Investigating the semantic aspect of language instead of the general language proficiency, Doherty (1998, 2000) argued that there is a fundamental mechanism shared by Theory of Mind development and the ability to understand the representational nature of language (Perner, 1991). Perner (1991) claimed that language is symbolically represented by pronunciation and writing, which is a form of non-mental presentation. The ability to understand this relation between the representation and the representational content, which is the meaning of language, is closely linked to the understanding of others’ belief and desire. Other researchers are also keen to investigate the relations between Theory of Mind development and different aspects of language. Instead of measuring children’s receptive vocabulary or general language ability, different kinds of semantic and syntactic measurements are taken and correlated with false-belief understanding. One focus has been metalinguistic awareness.
separated from its representational content (Doherty, 2008; Farrar et al, 2005). The components of metalinguistic awareness are very much relevant to the components of language: phonological awareness (Blachman, 2000), grammatical awareness (de Villier & de Villier, 1972), as well as semantic awareness (Doherty & Perner, 1998). As a communication tool, language naturally conveys information, or its representational content. Representation represents something being in a certain way
(Perner, 1991). Thus, a representation is not just an object itself, but also evokes something else. For example, a photo of you is a piece of paper with picture on it, but nonetheless reminds others of ‘you’. Typically, a photo, as well as language, is a non-mental representation, whereas non-mental states are non-mental representations. When you are thinking of, say, your mother, the mental state ‘thinking’ is in fact the mental representation of your mother. However, language and mental states share the characteristics of aboutness: representation is about its representational content (Perner, 1991). This similarity between mental and non-mental representation plays an important role in the research on metalinguistic awareness. It has been hypothesised that Theory of Mind development occurs at roughly the same age as metalinguistic awareness (Doherty & Perner, 1998; Doherty, 2000, 2006).
metalinguistic awareness has a close relation with representation, when does it develop? The hypothesised timing varies from as early as when children start to develop speech (interaction hypothesis), to 5–7 years (autonomy hypothesis). Interaction hypothesis suggests that children have a reflective understanding of language acquisition, which interacts with learning (Clark, 1978; Clark & Anderson, 1979; Marshall & Morton, 1978). This understanding of language may begin from the early stages of language acquisition, before 2 years of age. The opposite view is that children’s linguistic ability is only ‘epilinguistic’ in early years, rather than reflective and intentional learning based on systematically collected knowledge (Gombert, 1990/1992). This is known as the autonomy hypothesis, which claims that metalinguistic awareness develops separately at the age of 5–7 (Gombert, 1990/1992; Hakes, 1980; Tunmer & Herriman, 1984; Van Kleeck, 1982).
(1998) predicted, metalinguistic awareness emerges at roughly the same age as theory of mind, which is around 4–4½ years.
In this study (Doherty & Perner, 1998), 3- to 5-year-old children were recruited to perform in a traditional false-belief task, which required children to predict where a protagonist would look for an unexpectedly moved object. A correct response indicates the demonstration of Theory of Mind, since it shows children’s ability to understand the conflict between others’ belief and reality. Following the false-belief task, children were asked to name a familiar object, e.g. rabbit, then to monitor another person’s attempt to name the same object with a different word, e.g. bunny. Essentially, this is a metalinguistic test in which children have to be able to recognise the possibility and correctness of synonyms. The performance of the two tasks correlated strongly at the age of 4, even after the effects of willingness and verbal intelligence are controlled for. In the later parts of the study, the results showed that younger children’s difficulties with metalinguistic tasks did not extend to a control task of equivalent logical structure and complexity. Also it seems unlikely that children’s difficulty with the synonym task was due to a reluctance to produce a different answer, but the inability to generate a different description of the same item. To sum up the findings, this study indicates that children can demonstrate metalinguistic awareness as early as 4 years of age, which is roughly the same predicted age in theory of mind development, with a strong statistical correlation between the performances on the two types of tasks.
person’s choice of a different object with the same name, avoiding the same object or misname. The performance correlated strongly with children’s understanding of synonymy and false belief, even after the effects of verbal intelligence, chronological age and control measures were partialled out. Doherty (2000) concluded his findings as indicating ‘that children’s ability to understand homonymy results from their ability to make a distinction characteristic to representation, a distinction fundamental to both metalinguistic awareness and theory of mind’. In other words, an appropriate understanding of the representational nature of language may be required for both the development of metalinguistic awreness and Theory of Mind.
exceed the capacity of young children. Therefore, it is possible that younger children’s inability to demonstrate phonological awareness is due to executive function limitation rather than a failure to understand representation (Farrar et al., 2005).
The failure to eliminate this possibility was due to the design of the above experiment where children’s phonological awareness was tested through a task that potentially demands higher level executive function in children than they can manage. This is nonetheless hard to avoid. Fundamentally, including the semantic awareness tasks (Doherty & Perner, 1998; Doherty, 2000), the tests of metalinguistic awareness all involved children’s effort in avoiding the representational content of language to some degree while generating a response. It seems very difficult to test metalinguistic awareness without involving the cognitive demand of executive functioning.
having this kind of control means that the ability of taking in new information, making decisions, and keeping track of thoughts or goals would be extremely difficult. Thus executive functioning is closely related to children’s learning difficulties and classroom performances (Gathercole & Alloway, 2004). Also the operation of executive functioning draws on short-term memory and working memory in order to coordinate different tasks and time-series.
of the criteria, participants are told whether it is correct or not after each response, thus inferring the criteria. After a period of time, the criteria would change, and the ability of shifting would allow participants to spot this change soon enough and act accordingly. Participants with working memory or executive functioning would instead keep making responses according to the initial criteria.
advantage’, which is closely related to the naming games between mother and child in these cultures. The exposure to nouns is much more compared to verbs, which have complicated forms in different tenses or with different pronouns (Caselli, 2001). However, this is a different scenario with non-indo languages. , Gopnik & Choi(1995) found that Chinese and Korean children learn nouns and verbs in their language at roughly the same pace. A possible explanation is that there is no verb transformation in these languages. For example, changes of tense only involve adding an adverb of time in Chinese. This feature makes verb more at a comprehensible level for young children. The mothers are less likely to be reluctant to use them when communicating with their children.
The above findings all yield the cognitive effect that bilingualism may have towards children’s metalinguistic awareness development. Bilingual children develop a conscious ability to distinguish between two language systems between the age of 3 and 6 years (Miller, 1978), which is close to the hypothesised development age for Theory of Mind (Doherty & Perner, 1998). This is hardly a coincidence, since the occurrence of code mixing and code switching can offer a plausible explanation, if combined with Perner (1991)’s representation theory. Code mixing happens at all levels in a bilingual child’s speech, including pronunciation of a word, vocabulary, grammar and even the message conveyed (Buckley, 2003). For example, an English/French bilingual child can use a French word in an English sentence or hold one side of a conversation in French while the other speaker uses English only. A demonstration of such cases is as follows:
Mother: How old are you? Child: Quarter (four), I think. Mother: I thought you are five.
Children: Non, je ne pas. (No, I’m not)
between metalinguistic awareness and Theory of mind. Bilingual children, especially those learning languages from two completely different systems, are expected to have a higher metalinguistic level than monolinguals.
Naturally, being able to acquire two languages and manipulate them at any level could not be possibility achieved without the operation of executive functioning. However, it is possible to recruit participants with the same type of first language acquisition, but different in their second language acquisition, and put them into different groups according to the second language competence. To standardise this variable, all participants have to share the same first and second languages. Therefore the metalinguistic ability is not measured, but scientifically estimated and organised to correlate with false-belief task performance. The complication of executive functioning can be overcome by avoiding metalinguistic tasks, but drawing samples from a population whose levels of metalinguistic awareness can be estimated.
languages are the minority language. Children from this background would ideally achieve what is called ‘balanced bilingualism’, where individuals show high and relatively equal levels of competence in two languages (Buckley, 2003). However, this is not always the case. The weaker language spoken by people who are bilingual is sometimes subject to an interference effect from the dominant language (Buckley, 2003). This effect is often reported by parents of bilingual children as ‘mixing up’ things. In fact, it could occur at all levels of language acquisition, including tone, vocabulary and grammar. It is common to hear a French child speaking English with a French accent. Sometimes, a Japanese/English bilingual would say ‘I you see’ instead of ‘I see you’, which is a sign of interference from Japanese grammar.
are rules of speaking a language both grammatically and socially. Although rules for language differ across cultures, this implicit understanding of language gives children a starting point when learning a new language. Children are more likely to form strategies employing this knowledge and referring to the mutual rules to make learning easier. For example, if one already knows that changing forms of a word can change tenses or singular/plural forms in English, he is very likely to draw on such rules in learning French. However, Buckley (2003) claimed that “Provided that they receive appropriate amounts of input in both languages, there is no evidence to suggest that sequential bilingual learners are any less proficient than simultaneous bilingual learners”. This claim seems to be contrary to the strategic advantage suggested by Madhani (1994), which implied that sequential bilingual learners should, theoretically demonstrate more language proficiency in early childhood. It would be interesting to investigate the conflicting claims further.
recently (Scottish Qualifications Authority, 2009). Therefore a sample of bilingual British Children in Chinese and English is not accessible. Adopted Chinese children started their language acquisition in an English environment and their families are more likely to expose them to Chinese language to maintain their cultural heritage (Gill & Jackson, 1982). However, their resource and language exposure intensity are not as much and well-organised as children of Chinese immigrants in Britain, who have regular access to Chinese language exposure at home, in Chinese schools and Chinese community. Thus, adopted Chinese children acquire Chinese in a sequential pattern and their bilingualism is of lower level compared to British born Chinese children, who are also simultaneous bilinguals.
The experimenter hypothesises that:
1) Children with different levels of bilingualism demonstrate different performance in Theory of Mind tasks. Systematically educated bilinguals would have the best task performance, followed by adopted children, then the monolinguals.
2) The outcomes of general English proficiency positively correlate with Theory of mind tasks performance.
3) The English proficiency of monolingual children is not different from that of sequential or simultaneous bilingual children.
5) Among the sequential bilinguals, there is no difference in general English proficiency between children with high Chinese exposure and those with low Chinese exposure.
Methods
Participants
There were three groups of participating children recruited for this research: a Monolingual group (N=10), an Adoption group (N=8) and a Bilingual group (N=9). Children in all three groups were aged between 3 and 7 years and currently residing in the UK.
The 10 children in the Monolingual group (age mean=46.9 months, SD=6.2) were native British children whose first language was English and who were living with their biological parent(s). They were recruited via the playgroup in the Department of Psychology in the University of Stirling. The Adoption group (age mean=54.5 months, SD=12.6) consisted of ethnically Chinese children who had been adopted by British families from mainland China before the age of 18 months. Most children in this group were contacted through the Central Scotland International Adoption Support Group (Panda Club), as well as one currently living in England. The Bilingual group (age mean=60, SD=16.3) included ethnically Chinese children who had been born in the UK and were living with their biological parents. This group was recruited with the support of the Glasgow Chinese School and the Alba CathayChinese School in Edinburgh.
group was at an intermediate level among the three, since most children were exposed to audio and visual Mandarin materials. Some children attended a monthly Chinese playgroup (Panda Club). Within the Adoption group, the children were further divided into two subgroups according to their level of Chinese exposure (High Exposure N=5, Low Exposure N=3). Finally, the children in the Bilingual group had the most Chinese language exposure, both from their families and Chinese schools. Not all children in this group were strictly bilingual, but all were reported to have Chinese language skills appropriate for second or later generation immigrants at their age group by parents and teachers.
All three groups were controlled for chronological age but not gender. The Bilingual group had the highest age mean, however, a one way ANOVA showed no significant age difference between the three groups (F (2, 24)= 2.749, p=.084). Moreover, the Monolingual and Bilingual groups included children of both genders, while there were only females in the Adoption group. This was due to the adoption situation specific to China. Among the Chinese children internationally adopted under one year of age, over 90% are female (INS Immigration Statistics, 2006).
Recruitment Methods
Half of the 8 children in the Adoption group were directly recruited from a monthly playgroup (Panda Club) organised by the Central Scotland International Adoption Support Group, which was founded and organised by the adoption parents in that area. The experimenter had been the hostess and teacher for the Panda Club for more than two years. These children were included as part of convenient sampling to ensure a relatively consistent level of Chinese exposure in terms of source and intensity. The experimenter made contact with the parents of one more child via one of the families in the Panda Club. Internet advertising was also used in the recruitment procedure, which brought two more families into contact with the experimenter. The visits, as well as the testing, occurred in the communities where the families were residing, mostly family houses.
corner in the classrooms. The only exception was a Cantonese-speaking family in Kirkcaldy, which was introduced to the experimenter by one of the participating families.
Materials
The research involved two types of assessments: English language assessment and Theory of Mind tasks.
The Test for Early Language Development-3 (TELD-3) was used to assess children’s English abilities in both receptive and expressive language, across all three groups. Theory of Mind tasks consisted three parts, unexpected transfer task, content task and Droodle task. Unexpected transfer task required a toy shoe and a cardboard box. The Content task required a sunglasses box and a toy car. Finally two different black and white drawings and another piece of paper with two 3cm holes were needed for the Droodle task (Appendix 1). In all three parts, a human doll was introduced to act as a research assistant. The doll, the shoe, the car and the cardboard box were all provided in the TELD-3 kit.
Tests and Measures
All children were recorded in terms of their date of birth, gender and testing dates. Parents of children in the Adoption group were also asked to complete an information sheet concerning the adoption date and answer a few questions assessing the child’s Chinese learning. (Appendix 2)
Reid & Hammill, 1991). A complete TELD-3 kit includes an Examiner’s Manual, Picture Book, 25 Profile/Examiner Record Booklets Form A, 25 Profile/Examiner Record Booklets, Form B and manipulatives, all in a study storage box. The test was built to assess the English spoken language ability of children aged between 2 years and 7 years 11 months.
The administration of TELD-3 involves two subtests: a Receptive Language subtest and an Expressive language subtest. The raw scores of these two subtests can then be interpreted into standardised quotients (with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15) and percentiles. Age equivalent scores are also reported for the subtests. Further interpretation is made available for clinical use as well.
TELD-3 was examined extensively for its reliability and validity. The test items were also designed and considered against bias relative to gender, disability, racial, socioeconomic and geographic factors. These features of TELD-3 satisfied the need of the reported research which has strong ethnical and geographic variables. Most importantly, the standardised quotients are ‘age-appropriate’. This made it possible to compare the language skills of groups with children of different ages.
Procedure
rapport building and actual testing varied between groups and was mostly decided upon parents’ suggestion. In the rapport-building session with the Monolingual group, the experimenter took part in a half-day outdoor activity with all children in the play group. The actual testing occurred during the third week after the rapport-building session. Children in the Adoption group were mostly seen individually and there was only one case where two children were in the same rapport-building session. The time scheme for this group was roughly the same with the Monolingual group, where testing was arranged two weeks after the rapport-building session. Exceptions occurred in cases where three children in the Adoption group were already very familiar with the experimenter. Thus testing was then carried out once the child was settled and happy to participate. Finally, the children in the Bilingual group were given approximately 10 minutes each just before the testing, due to limited student availability in schools. However, the testing only proceeded when both experimenter and the guardian (parent or teacher) agreed that the child was relaxed and comfortable to participate. The testing procedure was identical for all three groups and it is worth noting that only English was used to communicate during the testing. All children were tested individually in a location which the guardian had suggested as being ‘quiet and familiar’ for the child. The presence of a guardian was determined by the request of the child, while the guardian was asked not to offer help on tasks.
tasks involved was always the unexpected transfer task, then the content task and finally the Droodle task. A full transcript of the Theory of Mind tasks can be found in Appendix 3. Verbal confirmation of each response was always required to pass a task. In the cases where the child only nodded or shook their head as an initial response, the experimenter said, ‘I can’t hear you. Could you say your answer aloud so I can hear?’ to encourage verbal response. With such a method, verbal responses were obtained in all Theory of Mind testing. To pass a task, the child needed to give the correct response to all the questions asked in the specific task. For successful performance on each task, a score of 1 was given. Therefore, the minimum score a child can obtain was 0 and the maximum was 3.
spoken language score (Composite Quotient) and the age equivalence for each subtest were calculated. All quotients were stratified by age.
Ethical Consideration
Three ethical issues unique to this research had arisen at the early stage of research design. They had been considered rigorously and addressed in the procedure of testing.
All the participants in this research were young children. They are considered a vulnerable group generally and caution was needed in the design of the research procedure. The experimenter had been issued with an Enhanced Disclosure Scotland form prior to the testing. Both language tests and ToM tasks had been piloted in previous research and were proven safe for children. The testing occurred in an environment familiar to the child and all testing materials were made child-friendly. Consents were obtained from the guardians in all cases, after detailed explanation of the research and the procedure. During the testing, a guardian was allowed to stay and observe, if the child expressed such a wish. Also the experiment used encouraging and positive language as much as possible around the child.
Finally the cultural differences between British families and Chinese families were fully respected during the whole procedure of participant recruitment and testing. Chinese versions of the consent form and the information sheet were both made available to Chinese parents, thus ensuring accurate understanding of the nature of the research and their rights.
Results
Theory of Mind
One way ANOVA was carried out to compare the total Theory of Mind task scores between the three groups with three different levels of bilingualism, and there was no significant difference in Theory of mind task performance. F (2, 24) =.242, p=.787. TELD-3 produced 4 test outcomes for each child, Receptive language quotient (RQuotient), Expressive language quotient (EQuotient), Receptive language age (RAge) and Expressive language age (EAge). The quotients are standardized scores for language performance on specific aspects of a child’s language development. They reflect a child’s linguistic ability at the time of testing without the complication of chronological age, providing a mean score of 100 and standard deviation of 15 across the population. These two quotients then make up the fifth outcome of the test, Composite quotient (CQuotient), which reflects the general spoken language performance. The age outcomes report a child’s linguistic development age according to the test results. Therefore, from the quotients, the experimenter could assess the level of a child’s spoken language among his peers, while the age outcomes provided an estimated age equivalent for both receptive and expressive language.
Pearson’s r was calculated for the correlation between each of four TELD-3 outcomes (RQuotient, EQuotient, Rage and EAge) and the total Theory of Mind task scores across all three groups. There was no two-tailed significant correlation between RQuotient and Theory of Mind scores in general (r= -.251, p=.206). The correlation between EQuotient and Theory of Mind scores in general was not significant either,
was considered. The Monolingual group showed no significant correlation between RQuotient and Theory of Mind scores (r=-.440, p=.203), or between EQuotient and Theory of Mind scores (r=.166, p=.646). In the Adoption group, there was no significant correlation between RQuotient and Theory of Mind scores (r=-.566, p=.144), or between EQuotient and Theory of Mind scores (r=-.063, p=.882). In the Bilingual group, there was no significant correlation between RQuotient and Theory of Mind scores (r=-.047, p=.904), or between EQuotient and Theory of Mind scores (r=.194, p=.617).
EAge and Theory of Mind scores across all three groups, while Graph 3 demonstrates this correlation but in separate groups.
Language
To investigate the relation between English language proficiency and different bilingualism patterns (monolingual, sequential bilingual- the Adoption group, and simultaneous bilingual- the Bilingual group), a one way ANOVA test was carried out for the between-group effect in all five outcomes of TELD-3 ( RQuotient, EQuotient, CQuotient, RAge and EAge).
effect in CQuotient, F (2, 24) =3.235, p=.057. Again there was no significant effect in the age outcomes, RAge F (2, 24) =2.580, p=.097, and EAge F (2, 24) =1.072, p=.358.
Post hoc LSD test showed that the Adoption group had significantly higher RQuotient than the Bilingual group (p<.05). While EQuotient was similar for the three groups, the between group difference in CQuotient was close to significance at .05 level. This again was mainly influenced by the difference between the Adoption and Bilingual groups (p<.05 in post hoc). The difference in RAge between the Adoption group and the Monolingual group was also significant, p<.05. There was no significant difference between groups in EAge in post hoc tests.
It is worth noting that since the quotients took the chronological ages of the children into consideration, the difference in performance could not be mostly attributed to the higher age means of the Adoption and Bilingual groups. In fact the Bilingual group, which had the highest mean age, had the lowest outcome measures in language tests.
Chinese Exposure Levels
Separate tests were performed for the Adoption group. The group was divided into two subgroups (High Exposure, N=5 and Low Exposure, N=3) according to the information forms filled out by parents. An independent t-test was carried out for the chronological age difference between the High Exposure group and the Low Exposure group. The result reported that the High Exposure group was significantly older than the Low Exposure group, t (6) =2.808, p<.05.
Graph 4 The mean RQuotient and CQuotients of the groups with different Chinese exposure levels.
Discussion
The results from this study converge on the following findings:
1) At the typical age of Theory of Mind development, children with different levels of bilingualism did not demonstrate any difference in term of Theory of Mind task performance. Thus Hypothesis 1 was rejected. Further more, among the Adoption group, higher level of exposure to a second language did not lead to better performance in Theory of Mind tasks. Therefore, the intensity of second language exposure or the proficiency of second language did not affect the development of Theory of Mind in children.
2) Children’s age equivalency in receptive and expressive language predicted their performance in Theory of Mind tasks, which was a better predictor than their level of English language proficiency among their even-aged peers. Also expressive language age was the best precursor of Theory of Mind task performance. Therefore, children’s expressive language maturity specifically correlated with children’s Theory of Mind development.
3) In terms of general language proficiency, the monolingual children and the children who learned the second language did not show any difference. Therefore, whether a child learns a second language does not necessarily affect their first language acquisition. However, among the children who only had exposure to the second language, low exposure indicated a higher proficiency in receptive language. 4) Sequential bilingual children, as predicted, demonstrated better receptive
Theory of Mind
The current study employed the representational nature of language to investigate young children’s Theory of Mind development. Perner (1991) concluded that representation is ‘something being in a certain way’. Both children’s metalinguistic awareness and false-belief understanding require the understanding of representation to develop. On the other hand, the acquisition of a second language, especially from different language systems, is evident to have advantages in metalinguistic awareness (Bain, 1996; Bialystock, 1988, 1991; Díaz, 1985; Galambos & Hakut, 1988; Hakuta, 1987; Hakuta & Díaz, 1985; Kessler & Quinn, 1980). Thus the experimenter predicted that a higher level of bilingualism indicated a higher level of metalinguistic awareness, which was used as a indicator of Theory of Mind development. Unlike hypothesised, levels of bilingualism did not predict children’s performance on Theory of Mind tasks. While having established the close relation between metalinguistic awareness and Theory of Mind development, bilingualism seemed to have failed to facilitate this relation.
or its knowledge of the real location. The above study suggests that the understanding of the use of mental terms can influence children’s false belief understanding. Similar results were found in Turkish speaking and Puerto-Rican Spanish speaking children (Martinez-Beck & Akar, 2003). They compared the false belief task performance of these children and that of children who speak Brazilian Portuguese or English. Compared to Turkish and Puerto-Rican Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and English do not explicitly mark the truth or falsity of beliefs. There was a slight advantage in the explicit languages among four year olds. Assuming that de Villier (1995) did offer a plausible hypothesis for the development of false belief understanding, there is a conflict in the way that information is conveyed through English and Chinese mental terms. This conflict may cause that the cognitive benefit of bilingualism does not extend to syntactic awareness in English, which, according to de Villier (1995), is essential to false belief understanding.
childhood. Therefore being able to represent the same object in different languages may not indicate children’s understanding of the representational nature of language. This does not conflict with Doherty and Perner (1998)’s finding that children develop semantic awareness around the age of 4. Cummins (1984) claims that children who learn an additional language in school require 5-7 years to reach a cognitive academic language proficiency in the additional language. Although the children recruited for the current study started second language acquisition in their preschool years, it is still likely that the timing for semantic awareness may differ when such awareness involves more than one language.
Finally, there is evidence that children who learn two languages from different systems do not show an advantage in phonological awareness (Bialystok & Herman, 1999). On the other hand, children who learn both French and English did perform better in phonological tasks (Bialystok & Herman, 1999). This could be a result of the similar phonological features between the two languages. Nonetheless, Chinese and English bilinguals would not have developed better phonological awareness compared to monolinguals or the children who had exposure to Chinese (the Adoption group).
In general, children’s performance seemed to correlate much better with expressive language age. This seemed to be contrary to the findings in Doherty and Perner (1998) synonym researches. They assessed children’s verbal mental age with a short version of British Pictorial Vocabulary Test, and reported almost indifferent verbal mental ages among tested children. However, this vocabulary test required children to point out an object from four pictures presented when the experimenter read out the name of the intended object. Therefore, this vocabulary test only assessed children’s receptive language proficiency and only focused on vocabulary aspect of receptive language. TELD-3, on the other hand, offered a full assessment of children’s receptive and expressive language proficiency and made certain outcomes age-appropriate. Therefore, it is evident that expressive language age is a good predictor of children’s Theory of Mind task performance across all three groups.
There are several explanations to this. First to explain why language quotients did not act as good predictors of Theory of Mind task performance, chronological age could again have influenced the results. Among normally developing children, older expressive language age often comes along with older chronological age. The language quotients produced by TELD-3 were age-appropriate, which means that they reflect how well children did compared to their even-aged peers. Thus the advantage in both Theory of Mind task performance and expressive language age could simply be a result of ascending chronological ages.
language age. Many researchers had found the false belief tasks highly verbal. Some even claim that the relation between false belief task performance only reflected that the domain-specific cognitive operations underlying false belief understanding require language for their implementation (Bloom & German, 2000; Chandler et al., 1989; Fodor, 1992; Frye, et al., 1995).
Milligan at al. (2007) conducted a meta-analysis using data from 104 studies (N=8,891) which investigated the relation between language abilities and false belief task performance. This study aimed to determine the effect direction and size of children’s language proficiency on false belief understanding, as well as which type of language ability best explains false belief understanding. One of their findings indicated that receptive vocabulary measures had weaker relations than measure of general language ability. They accounted for this result by explaining the nature of language ability tests. Receptive vocabulary tests can isolate specific language ability from others, where as other language tests like semantic test may draw on more than one aspect of language development. Ruffman at al. (2003) pointed out that most language tests are not a pure measure of syntactic ability. Similar with receptive vocabulary test, the receptive language measure in TELD-3 mostly involved children’s understanding of the test question and pointing out the choice of answer. Thus there is less overlap with other language abilities in receptive test, which could partly explain the non-significant correlation between receptive language tests and Theory of Mind task performance.
after encouragement, some children may feel reluctant to answer Theory of Mind task questions because they felt less confident speaking. Therefore, some children may find Theory of Mind tasks more difficult because they have to give verbal response. This possibility may have caused the relation between expressive mental age and Theory of Mind task performance showed in the results.
English language proficiency
maintaining their cultural heritage. The children from the Bilingual group had various types of family background. Those children whose parents spoke different languages, i.e. Mandarin/Cantonese, or Chinese/English, tend to receive English language input most of the times, since English is the mutual language of both the parents in their family setting. Some children were third or even forth generation immigrants. Their parents, who did not develop Chinese language skills in an organic cultural setting, often prefer to speak English in their daily activities. Finally, for the second generation immigrant children, their parents put enormous effort in balancing both Chinese and English language inputs in family life to encourage their children’s social interaction outside the Chinese community. In all these cases, Chinese and English entered these children’s life at roughly the same age, but Chinese was only systematically educated when the child was old enough to enter the Chinese school. Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that Chinese was the second language for all these children.
provided. Clearly it is not the case in the current study. The Adoption group received far less Chinese input compared to their English input or the Chinese input received by the Bilingual group, both in terms of the intensity and systematical exposure. Thus the results can not be interpreted as the evidence against Buckley (2003)’s claim. Genesee (1993) concluded that children acquiring two languages at the same time proceed through the same stages of language development as monolingual speakers learning the same language. This explains the roughly same TELD-3 test outcomes between the Monolingual group and the Bilingual group. However, there is a difference in receptive and expressive language milestones between simultaneous bilingual and monolingual learners. The expressive language milestones are commonly extended by two to three months among simultaneous bilinguals before the age of three (Watson, 1995; Watson & Cummins, 1999).
literacy skills and a developing aspects of language in order to derive the meaning of a word, sentence or text” (Buckley, 2003). The common age for children to enter ‘cognitive academic language proficiency’ is four to five years (Cummins, 1984). Cummins (1984) also claimed that children who learn an additional language after entering ‘cognitive academic language proficiency’ normally need another year or two to develop ‘basic interpersonal communication skills’ in the additional language. Children are thought to use their developing awareness about language generally to make sense of the additional language (Buckley, 2003).To move on from the first stage, children need another five to seven years to enter ‘cognitive academic language proficiency’ in the additional language.
more at risk of language loss, which is essentially the result of interference of two languages. Therefore, when children do not receive sufficient language support, high exposure in the additional language may bring negative effect in first language acquisition to a certain extent.
General Discussion
The current study also suffered from a few general issues in methodology and recruitment. The sample size was very small for a study investigating the effect of a three-level independent variable (levels of bilingualism). However, the population of Chinese children adopted from China and the population of young Chinese immigrant who also receive Chinese school education were rather small compared to that of general UK population. Also, the uneven age distribute in the three groups may be a cause for concern. Although one way ANOVA showed no significant difference in the mean ages between the three groups, further independent t-test did report that the children in the Bilingual group were much older than those in the Monolingual group, t(17)= 8.965, p<.05. Both Chinese schools only accepted pupils aged at least 5 years old at the start of the school year, and the testing happened at the very end of the school year. Inevitably children recruited from these sources generally ages around 6 years.
performance in both language test and Theory of Mind tasks. Monolingual children were al tested in a separate room, designed for interviews with children. Homes were also close to perfect experimental setting, since it allowed the experimenter to communicate with the child one-to-one in a quiet and comfortable environment. In the cases where the testing had to take place in a classroom or a public place, the level of public density and noise could have both had negative effect on task performance and children’s willingness to participate (Sherrod & Cohen, 1976).
Also, a participating child only passed one Theory of Mind task when he or she answered all the test questions correctly. This was to eliminate the possibility that the correct responses were due to chance, but not an accurate understanding of false belief. However, such strict criteria might have underestimated children’s Theory of Mind in some cases and failed to reflect the gradual development of Theory of Mind among young children.
development. Moreover, a standardised measure of French language proficiency can be provided alongside general English language proficiency to scientifically assess the interaction of the acquisition of these languages.
Conclusion
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Appendix
Appendix 2 Participant information sheet
Participant Information
Name
Age
Gender
Group: Adoption
Age when adopted (CA only)
Date of first visit
Date of second visit
Parental Report (CA/CB only)
1) Age started learning Mandarin
2) Time spent learning
3) Any regular play groups or activities in Mandarin
4) Main language of communication
5) Mandarin material used at home
6) How many Mandarin words learned (Inventory if possible)
Appendix 3 Theory of Mind Task Transcript
Theory of Mind Tasks Transcript
Unexpected Transfer Task
This is a doll, (show it to the child) do you think this is a boy or a girl? (After the child answers, he/she is encouraged to give the doll a name X.) Now look what has X got? That’s right, a toy shoe! But now X doesn’t need it, so the shoe is put away. (X hides the shoe in a box on desk.) X is tired and I think he better go for a nap. (Doll yawns and stretches, then lies down facing away from the child and the desk.) X is asleep now and can’t see or hear us! Let’s play a trick on him. I think we can take out his shoe and put it somewhere else! Where should I hide it? How about behind me? (Child nodes) Oops I think X is awake! (Doll is turned to sit up and face the child.) X wants his shoe now, doesn’t he? (Doll nodes)
Test Question:
Where will X look first for his shoe?
Reality Question:
And where is the shoe really?
Memory Question:
Do you remember where X put the shoe in the beginning?
Content Task
answered, the box was opened to reveal a yellow car. This question was then asked: what do you think was in the box, before I opened it? (Memory Question) The box was then shut and doll X is turned facing the child. Now X hasn’t seen what’s inside the box, has he? What does he think is inside, before I open the box? (Test Question)
Droodle Task
The droodle task involves two A4 black and white drawings of a birthday cake and a gorilla playing with a computer, printed by a HP Laser Jet 4100. Both drawings are of roughly the same size and located in the same position on paper. Another piece of paper with two 3cm holes could be laid over these drawings. With only this small portion of drawing visible, it is impossible to tell the content of drawings. Doll X is again used as research assistant and sit facing away from the desk..
Self-experience Question:
One of the drawings is randomly selected and the piece of paper with holes is laid over it before shown to the child. The child is then asked what they think is on the picture. Whether or not the child makes a guess, the experimenter says, ‘shall we have a look?’ and removes the piece of paper on top. The cover is replaces after making sure the child sees the drawing. The experimenter then brings up the doll and asks the child, ‘X has never seen this picture before, has he? If he comes now and sees this (point to the covered drawing), does he know what is on it?’
Full information control Question:
concealing the drawing, X is brought forward facing the drawing. The experimenter then asks, ‘X has never seen this picture, has he? If he comes and sees this, does he know what is on it?’
Appendix 4 Participant Consent Form
Participant Information Sheet and Consent Form
I am interested in the relation between children’s learning of second language and Theory of Mind development. ‘Theory of Mind’ is a term used to refer to children’s ability to understand others’ state of mind. Having ‘theory of mind’ is important for us in many ways, especially communication and learning. I believe that theory of mind is closely related to different language representations, i.e. in different languages, the same object would commonly have different names. My prediction is that theory of mind development has a positive relation with children’s experience of learning a second language. I wish my research can provide strong evidence for the benefit of learning a second language at a young age.
Also I would like to further the argument that very young children adopted from a different country do have the potential to learn adoption family’s language (English, in this case) normally, just like any other British child..
Participating in this research means that you and your child will be visited twice at a place you feel comfortable at. The first time I will need to ask you, the parent, a few questions about your child’s basic information in relevance with the adoption and language learning. Mostly importantly, I wish to take part in your family play and hopefully get to know your child better! During the second visit, your child will be involved in a few Theory of Mind and language tests. I just need to show your child some pictures, i.e. daily objects and toys, i.e. a doll or marbles, and then ask some simple questions.
Each visit should not last more than 45 minutes normally. Thank you very much for you participation!
Important
As a participant and the guardian of the participant in this research, you have the right to either withdraw from this research at any point, or withdraw data collected from you and your child after the data collection, if clear intention is expressed to the experimenter.
As the experimenter of the research, I will consider the data collected for this research as fully confidential from any third party other than my supervisors. If this research is published, the participants will not be identified.
If you have any question concerning this research before or after the testing, you are more than welcome to contact me via email.
As an informed participant of this experiment, I understand that:
1. My participation is voluntary and I may cease to take part in this
experiment at any time, without penalty.
2. I am aware of what my participation involves.
3. There are no risks involved in the participation of this study.
4. All my questions about the study have been satisfactorily answered.
I have read and understood the above, and give consent to participate:
Participant’s Signature:__________________________________ Date:__________
Appendix 5 Full detailed explanation to parents (Adoption group)
Hello, I am a Child Development postgraduate student in Stirling University. I am doing researches on children’s bilingualism and ‘theory of mind’ as my dissertation thesis this year. ‘Theory of mind’ is a term used to refer to children’s ability to understand others’ state of mind. Having ‘theory of mind’ is important for us in many ways, especially communication and learning. I believe that theory of mi
