The Relationship between False Belief and Sentential Complement in Korean Speaking Children with Autism (한국 자폐 아동에서 살펴본 틀린 믿음과 보문의 관계 )

Hyeon Jin Lee (이현진); HyeKyeung Seung; Jeffrey Farrar (제프리파라); SUNG HOON Jeong (정성훈); Un-Sun Chung (정운선); Kyung A  Kim (김경아); 권은영

The Relationship between False Belief and Sentential Complement in Korean Speaking Children with Autism

THE KOREAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
2009, 22(2), pp.131-147
Publisher : The Korean Society For Developmental Psychology
Research Area : Social Science > Psychological Science

Hyeon Jin Lee ¹, HyeKyeung Seung ², Jeffrey Farrar ³, SUNG HOON Jeong ⁴, Un-Sun Chung ⁵, Kyung A Kim ¹, 권은영 ¹

¹영남대학교
²California State University, Fullerton
³University of Florida
⁴경북대학교
⁵경북대학교병원

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study examined the relationship between language and false belief in Korean children with autism (n=14). Specifically, it aimed to explore whether understanding of sentential complement structures could predict performance on false belief tasks in Korean children with autism. The children were tested with two kinds of false belief tasks (i.e., location change and content change tasks) and three kinds of language tasks (i.e., complement structure with a mental verb (think), complement structures with a communication verb (say), and relative clause structures). The tasks were presented as short stories with picture descriptions on a laptop computer. Questions were asked after each short story presentation. The data showed that the Korean children with autism performed lower than the typically developing Korean children did. Furthermore, multiple regression analyses indicated that the understanding of complement structures with a mental verb (think) predicted false belief task performance. But understanding of complement structures with a communication verb (say) and the relative clause comprehension were not predictive. The results support the view of de Villiers that false belief task performance is preceded by understanding of sentential complement structure. The lower performance of the Korean autistic children can also be interpreted as evidence that supports Baron-Cohen's theory of mind deficit hypothesis of autism.

KEYWORDS

children with autism, understanding of sentential complement structure, understanding of relative clause, mental state verb, communication verb, theory of mind deficit hypothesis of autism

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

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This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.

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