2008, Vol.21, No.3

THE KOREAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.67

pISSN : 1229-0718 / eISSN : 2671-6542
https://journal.kci.go.kr/baldal

This study examined whether earlier language abilities could predict the performance of false belief at a later time. Fifty-five children participated in the study, whose ages ranged from 3;2 to 3;11(M=3;7) at the beginning of the study. The children were tested 3 times at intervals of six-months. The three kinds of language tasks were used to measure the complement understanding; the infinitival complement of the mental verb‘want’the sentential complement of the mental verb‘think’and the communication verb‘say’. Receptive vocabularies were also measured. The false belief tasks included non-verbal false belief tasks, unexpected location tasks, and unexpected content tasks. The results of hierarchical regression analyses suggested that earlier language abilities, especially the understanding of the sentential complement, can predict the performance in the false belief tasks.

This study examined the relationship between theory of mind and social competence in preschool children. Children were tested on two kinds of mind understanding tasks: mind-reading and emotion-reading, and teachers were asked to rate Matson Evaluation of Social Skills with Youngsters, Index of Empathy for Children and Adolescents, and a Measure of Aggression and Prosocial behaviors. Mind-reading tasks assessed the ability to interpret others' behaviors by reading their mental states, and emotion-reading tasks assessed the ability to read others' emotional states through their facial expressions. Participants were 48 five-year old children. The result showed that mind-reading was significantly related to social skill score. The empathy score was significantly related to the scores of social skill, inappropriate assertiveness, aggression and prosocial behaviors. For the girls, mind-reading predicted social skill score along with empathy. However, mind-reading predicted none of social behaviors for the boys. Empathy scores were the best predictor of social skill, inappropriate assertiveness, aggression, and prosocial behaviors for both. Finally, boys and girls did not differ in their scores on mind-understanding tasks. It was discussed that there is difference between children's theory of mind and the way how they employ their ToM in the social world, and the relationship between theory of mind and social competence is complex.

The present research examined how Korean infants interpret others' pointing actions. In Experiment 1, the infants in the touch condition were familiarized with an event in which the actor pointed to one of the two objects. After the positions of objects were switched, each infant received test events of two types: The actor pointed to the new goal object(new-goal event) or the old goal object(old-goal event). In the control condition, there was only one object during familiarization. As a result, the infants in the touch condition looked reliably longer at the new-goal event than the old-goal event. In contrast, the infants in the control condition looked about equally at both events. In Experiment 2, 9-month-olds looked reliably longer at the new-goal event even though there was a 3.5cm gap between the actor's index finger and the target object. In Experiment 3, 7-month-olds were tested in the same procedure as that of the touch condition in Experiment 1. They looked about equally at both events. The results showed that between 7 and 9-month-old Korean infants develop their ability to understand others' pointing actions as goal-directed.