Abstrakt
Children do not always grasp the correct principle of I/You reference at first: they use proper names, make reversal errors, or use both forms interchangeably. For the correct use and comprehension, they need to achieve certain level in their syntactic and morphological development, and they need to understand both, the difference between self and others, and the perspective of the speaker.
The social abilities considered here may be related to later ToM. In our study, we analyze children's performance in production and comprehension of person reference, as well as in tasks aimed on selected social abilities and general language development.
We expect that the effect of the social performance will explain significant amount of variation in person reference above and beyond the effect of general language development, and vice versa. Our participants were 2.5 years old Czech toddlers (age range: 28-32 months).
So far, data from 51 children were analyzed. The testing took place individualy and was divided into two sessions.
To measure the ToM precursors, the children were given three tasks concerned with visual perspective, intention undersanding and pretend play. We adopt five other tasks from the previous studies concerned with person reference production and comprehension and one lexical and one grammatical comprehension test as measures of the general language development.
Our key analyses examine the effects of pretense, intention understanding and lexicon on production and comprehension of person reference. Lexicon and pretense have significant concurrent effects on the comprehension score (see table1), and lexicon, pretense and intention understanding have significant concurrent effects on the production score (see table2).
The models suggest that person reference in production and comprehension is related to somewhat different sets of social cognition measures. However, both the models contain a linguistic as well as a social predictor, as hypothesized.