Syntactic mediation of social cognition:Complement clauses and perspective taking in children with autism

The complement-clause construction is a crosslinguistically widespread syntactic strategy for representing and communicating about perspectives on situations. With its embedding format, it allows speakers to present propositions that they agree or disagree with, to anchor these propositions in conceptualizers and to specify the perspectival relationship between conceptualizers and propositions, as in dad says [it’s his cake] or I know [it’s my cake] (Verhagen 2005). Children’s sociocognitive ability to represent and reason about their own and others’ mental states, i.e. what they and others believe, know and feel, undergoes substantial development at around 3-4 years of age (Wellman et al. 2001), and de Villiers & de Villiers (2000) have proposed that language plays a causal role in this process. Specifically, de Villiers & de Villiers (2000) suggest that the complement-clause construction offers children a unique format for representing false beliefs, and this claim has found support in a line of studies with typically developing children (e.g. Hale & Tager-Flusberg 2003, Lohmann & Tomasello 2003, Low 2010). Children with autism spectrum disorders have repeatedly been found to exhibit impaired sensitivity to others’ mental states (Baron-Cohen et al. 1985, Happé 1994), but also in this population, correlation studies have demonstrated a relationship between complement-clause mastery and perspective taking (Lind & Bowler 2009). The present study examines the direction of causality in this tight relationship between linguistic and sociocognitive development, investigating whether children with autism are able to use linguistic perspective marking as a tool for reasoning about divergent mental states. First, I report results from a correlation study involving 107 6-to-9-year-olds with autism or typical development, showing that complement-clause mastery is a significant predictor of advanced mental-state reasoning in both groups. Second, I present a training study including 54 children with autism assigned to two training conditions with linguistic mediation of perspectives and two control conditions without linguistic training. In the linguistic training conditions, children’s perspective-taking performance improved significantly, whereas no improvement was found in the control conditions. Children trained with complement clauses advanced most, but simpler forms of linguistic perspective marking were also beneficial. Together, the two studies indicate that children with autism benefit from mastery of the complement-clause construction as a privileged tool for syntactic mediation of perspective taking. References Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M. & Frith, U. 1985. Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”? Cognition 21: 37-46. de Villiers, J.G. & P.A. de Villiers. 2000. Linguistic determinism and the understanding of false beliefs. In Children’s Reasoning and the Mind, ed. P. Mitchell and K. Riggs, 189-226. Hove, UK: Psychology Press. Hale, C. M. & H. Tager-Flusberg. 2003. The influence of language on theory of mind: A training study. Developmental Science 6,3: 346–359. Happé, F.G.E. 1994. An advanced test of theory of mind: understanding of story characters' thoughts and feelings by able autistic, mentally handicapped, and normal children and adults. Journal Of Autism and Developmental Disorders 24,2: 129-154. Lind, S.E. & D.M. Bowler. 2009. Language and theory of mind in autism spectrum disorder: The relationship between complement syntax and false belief task performance. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 39,6: 929-937. Lohmann, H. & M. Tomasello. 2003. The role of language in the development of false belief understanding: A training study. Child Development 74,4: 1130-1144. Low, J. 2010. Preschoolers’ implicit and explicit false-belief understanding: Relations with complex syntactical mastery. Child Development 81: 597-615. Verhagen, A. 2005. Constructions of intersubjectivity: Discourse, syntax, and cognition. New York: Oxford University Press. Wellman, H.M., D. Cross & J. Watson. 2001. Metaanalysis of theory-of-mind development: The truth about false belief. Child Development 72: 655-684

Kroppen i læring, læring i kroppen: Kropsforankret sprogundervisning på Zoom og i auditoriet

Didaktiske eksperimenter på natur- og sundhedsvidenskab har vist at læringsaktiviteter der giver universitetsstuderende relevante sansemotoriske erfaringer, styrker forståelse og hukommelse, men betydningen af sansning og bevægelse i humanioraundervisning er underbelyst. Gennem to pilotstudier med fokus på design, deltagelse og evaluering undersøger denne artikel kropsforankret læring på Humaniora i to læringskontekster: digital undervisning på Zoom og auditorieundervisning på campus. Undersøgelsen viser at det også i humanioraundervisning er muligt at udvikle kropsforankrede læringsaktiviteter med stærk konceptuel integration, at de studerende deltog aktivt, og at de evaluerede aktiviteterne meget positivt. Sammenligningen af det fysiske og digitale læringsrum viser at kropsforankrede læringsaktiviteter fungerede godt i begge, med tilpasning til læringskonteksternes forskellige praktiske begrænsninger og muligheder. Auditoriet er en potentielt mere sårbar kontekst fordi deltagelse er synlig for alle, men samtidig åbner samværet i et fælles fysisk og socialt rum mulighed for aktiviteter hvor samspillet mellem de studerendes kroppe er grundlaget for læringsaktiviteternes konceptuelle integration.

Do complement clauses really support false-belief reasoning? A longitudinal study with English-speaking 2- to 3-year-olds

To examine whether children’s acquisition of perspective-marking language supports development in their ability to reason about mental states, we conducted a longitudinal study testing whether proficiency with complement clauses around age three explained variance in false-belief reasoning six months later. 45 English-speaking 2-and-3-year-olds (23 female, Time 1 age range: 33-41 months) from middle-class families in the North-West of England took part in the study, which addresses a series of uncertainties in previous studies: We avoided the confound of using complement clauses in the false-belief tests, assessed complement-clause proficiency with a new comprehensive test designed to capture gradual development, and controlled for individual differences in executive functioning that could affect both linguistic and sociocognitive performance. Further, we aimed to disentangle the influence of two aspects of complement-clause acquisition: proficiency with the perspective-marking syntactic structure itself and understanding of the specific mental verbs used in this syntactic structure. To investigate direction of causality, we also tested whether early false-belief reasoning predicted later complement-clause proficiency. The results provide strong support for the hypothesis that complement-clause acquisition promotes development in false-belief reasoning. Proficiency with the general structure of complement-clause constructions and understanding of the specific mental verbs “think” and “know” in 3rd-person complements at Time 1 both contributed uniquely to predicting false-belief performance at Time 2. However, false-belief performance at Time 1 also contributed uniquely to predicting complement-clause proficiency at Time 2. Together, these results indicate a bidirectional relationship between linguistic and sociocognitive development