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Children's understanding of idioms and theory of mind development
Author(s) -
Caillies Stéphanie,
Le SournBissaoui Sandrine
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00720.x
Subject(s) - psychology , theory of mind , cognitive psychology , cognitive science , developmental psychology , cognition , neuroscience
The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis according to which theory of mind competence was a prerequisite to ambiguous idioms understanding. We hypothesized that the child needs to understand that the literal interpretation could be a false world representation, a false belief, and that the speaker's intention is to mean something else, to correctly process idiomatic expressions. Two kinds of ambiguous idioms were of interest: decomposable and nondecomposable expressions (Titone & Connine, 1999). An experiment was designed to assess the figurative developmental changes that occur with theory of mind competence. Five‐, 6‐ and 7‐year‐old children performed five theory of mind tasks (an appearance–reality task, three false‐belief tasks and a second‐order false‐belief task) and listened to decomposable and nondecomposable idiomatic expressions inserted in context, before performing a multiple choice task. Results indicated that only nondecomposable idiomatic expression was predicted from the theory of mind scores, and particularly from the second‐order competences. Results are discussed with respect to theory of mind and verbal competences.