A comparison of 3- and 4-year-old English monolinguals, Mandarin monolinguals, and Mandarin-English bilinguals on a series of theory of mind-related tasks.

This research examines whether an individual's linguistic knowledge, either as a speaker of a particular language or as a bilingual, influences theory of mind development. Three- and 4-year-old English monolinguals, Mandarin Chinese monolinguals, and Mandarin-English bilinguals were given four theory of mind-related tasks, an appearance-reality, a level 2 perspective-taking, an 'unexpected contents' false-belief, and an 'unexpected transfer' false-belief task. All children were tested twice, a week apart; the bilinguals were tested in each of their languages. The children were also given a Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and two metalinguistic tasks. The Mandarin- and English-speaking children were hypothesized to perform very similarly on all theory of mind and metalinguistic tasks. In contrast, the bilingual children were predicted to perform significantly better than both groups of monolinguals on all theory of mind tasks and both metalinguistic tasks but were expected to perform worse on the vocabulary tests. The results of the Chinese and English monolingual comparisons, as predicted, showed no significant language difference for any of the tasks, and a significant age difference for the theory of mind-related tasks, with 4-year-olds performing better than 3-year-olds. For the monolingual and bilingual comparisons, the vocabulary test scores were the only ones in which the bilinguals' scores were sometimes lower than the monolinguals. The combined scores of the theory of mind-related tasks of the bilingual group were higher than both the Mandarin and English monolingual groups at the first testing time but not the second so the hypothesis concerning a bilingual advantage received partial support. Four-year-olds performed better than 3-year-olds in all theory of mind-related tasks. There was some evidence for a metalinguistic advantage for the bilinguals. Mandarin monolinguals appear to perform very similarly to English monolinguals, but bilingualism seems to aid children in gaining an understanding of mind. This advantage may have been caused by a number of factors; greater inhibitory control, greater metalinguistic understanding, and a greater sensitivity to sociolinguistic interactions with interlocutors are all proposed as possible important factors.Ph.D.Cognitive psychologyDevelopmental psychologyLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsLinguisticsPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132142/2/9959767.pd