The relationship between language skills and understanding of theory of mind in young children

[[abstract]]The relationship between language skills and understanding of theory of mind in young children Abstract The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between language skills and understanding of theory of mind (TOM hereafter) in young children. Fifty-seven 3- to 5-year-olds were tested on general language (receptive semantic and pragmatic skills), receptive syntactic comprehension, complement-understanding, and TOM (including false-belief task, intention task and appearance-reality task). In addition, narratives of the book “Frog, where are you” were collected to analyze children’s mean language of utterance and production of complicated sentences. Results showed that the children’s general language ability and complement-understanding were positively related to their understanding of theory of mind. Receptive pragmatic ability of the 3-year-olds was found to be significantly correlated with their understanding of TOM. As for the 4-year-olds, the receptive semantic and syntactic skills were significantly correlated with their understanding of TOM. Receptive semantic, syntactic and pragmatic skills were all found to be significantly correlated with understanding of TOM in the 5-year-olds. Finding of this study also showed that complement-understanding ability in the four- and five-year-olds was significantly correlated with their understanding of TOM. Suggestions for future research and educational implications were proposed according to the findings of this study. Key words：young children, language skills, theory of mind