Mentalizing skills of non-native, early signers: A longitudinal perspective

Abstract

Using a longitudinal design, the mentalizing skills of a group of deaf children were tested with a wide array of theory of mind tasks over a period of three years. A selection of results from the first two years of testing is reported here. The children were non-native signers, but had been offered a good regime for the development of sign language as soon as their deafness was discovered. A comparison group of hearing children matched for mental age and sex also took part. There was a wide variation in performance between children in the deaf group, both across different tasks and over time, while the hearing group performed more or less at ceiling on all of the tasks included already at the first data collection time, and showed very little variation in performance across tasks. Also, the deaf children, as well as the hearing children, performed 100% correct on a test of non-mental representation, i.e., the false-photo task (Zaitchik, 1990). The present results speak in favour of the crucial importance of early communication using a common language for the typical developmental trajectory of mentalizing skills.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all the children and families as well as the teachers and school administrators who participated in the study for their generosity and co-operation in making this research project possible. Thanks also to Karin Mellberg for helping with the data collection.

This research was supported by a grant from the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research (2001–112) to Professor Erland Hjelmquist.