2008, Vol.21, No.4

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 examines the developmental change of children's ability to use trait informations for making inferences about behaviors and mental states. A total of 181 kindergarteners, second-graders, and fourth-graders participated in this study. Children were presented two behavioral informations of a story character from which a personality trait could be inferred. Their tasks were to predict and infer the story character's behavior and mental states such as belief, desire, intention, and emotional response. The results indicate that preschoolers have ability to predict behaviors by using the trait informations. However, they could not use the trait informations as a basis for making mental inference. These results suggest that children change from the viewing traits as behavioral regularities to understanding them as causal mediators to produce mental states such as desire, belief, and feeling.

This study investigated English word reading development of the Korean second graders who acquired grapheme-phoneme(G-P) correspondence rules. Forty four of children divided into two groups (High and Low in Hangul reading skill). In experiment 1, both high and low groups could read more familiar CVC words than unfamiliar CCVCC, and there were significant differences between High and Low group. In experiment 2, two groups could read more unfamiliar CVC words than familiar CVCV and there were significant differences between High and Low group, and 50% of the High group could read CVC as well as CVCV and bisyllables, however 50% of the Low group could only read CVC. These results suggest that Korean second graders can apply G-P rules as well as letter-sound correspondences of some larger orthographic unit according to the English word spelling patterns, their G-P correspondences skill is different according to the level of Hangul reading skill, and the grower their English reading skill, the more they were influenced by the type of spelling patterns than the familiarity of words.

This study investigated the relationships among false belief, emotion, language, and social behavior in four- and five-year-old children. The participants were 30 four-year-old children and 30 five-year-old typically developing children in two kindergartens. The children's abilities were measured by using language tasks, false belief tasks, emotional perspective taking tasks, and the Korean Version of the Social Skills Rating System-Preschool Form (K-SSRS). The results showed that 4-year-old children's false belief performance was significantly correlated with emotional perspective taking whereas 5-year-old children's false belief performance was significantly correlated with complement understanding and social skill scores. The findings also suggest that understanding of false-belief may be separated from understanding of emotion in terms of aspects of social behavior in young children. The results of multiple regression analysis showed that receptive vocabulary predicted social behavior in 4-year-olds, while the false belief performance predicted social behavior in 5-year-olds. In addition, the complement understanding predicted the false belief performance in 5-year-olds. These results suggest that the vocabulary along with the false belief performance is a predictor of social behavior in Korean children, the complement understanding is a predictor of false belief reasoning.