Mental state language and quality of conversational experience in deaf and hearing children

Deaf children from hearing parents show a protracted delay in their performance on standard ‘theory of mind’ measures that concern their knowledge of false beliefs and other reality incongruent mental states. Considerable evidence indicates that children’s early experience of adults’ mental state talk predicts their later social cognitive development. However, no previous study has analyzed access to conversation about mental states in very young deaf children. We compared the conversational input of hearing parents to young deaf and hearing children aged 17 to 35 months in the UK and Sweden. Parents of hearing children used far more cognitive mental state language with their infants and their conversations were characterized by more communicatively effective turn-taking than parents of deaf children. These findings indicate that conversational input about mental states to very young deaf children differs significantly in those areas of interaction thought to be crucial for later social cognitive development and this difference is robust across two different cultures

Environment and language experience in deaf children's theory of mind development

We focus in this chapter on the human social cognitive ability to connect with each other at the level of different inner and unobservable mental states such as knowledge and beliefs; a development encapsulated in the term theory of mind (ToM). The development of children’s ToM has been a major research topic for the last 30 years and recently attention has turned to the environmental enablers of social cognition found in early parent–child interaction

The Effects of a Multimodal Intervention on the Reading Skills of Struggling Students : An Exploration Across Countries

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of a multimodal program, designed for practicing reading, on reading development in struggling readers in two different countries. The research question was whether one specific training method will have a positive effect on pupils’ reading development in two different countries with different educational systems and as diverse orthographies as the shallow Croatian and the relatively deep Swedish orthography. It became clear that Swedish teachers have a tradition of implementing interventions as opposed to Croatia where there is no tradition of teachers conducting intervention studies in school. Comparing different school systems is difficult which is evident in the results that differ between the two countries. However, the results indicate that the multimodal reading training program used in the intervention had positive effects on pupils’ literacy development, including decoding, spelling, and reading comprehension in both countries.

PAPER Belief attribution in deaf and hearing infants

Abstract Based on anticipatory looking and reactions to violations of expected events, infants have been credited with 'theory of mind' (ToM) knowledge that a person's search behaviour for an object will be guided by true or false beliefs about the object's location. However, little is known about the preconditions for looking patterns consistent with belief attribution in infants. In this study, we compared the performance of 17-to 26-month-olds on anticipatory looking in ToM tasks. The infants were either hearing or were deaf from hearing families and thus delayed in communicative experience gained from access to language and conversational input. Hearing infants significantly outperformed their deaf counterparts in anticipating the search actions of a cartoon character that held a false belief about a target-object location. By contrast, the performance of the two groups in a true belief condition did not differ significantly. These findings suggest for the first time that access to language and conversational input contributes to early ToM reasoning

Minnesteckningar över avlidna ledamöter 2013. Särtryck ur KVVS Årsbok 2014

Minnesteckningar. Kungl. Vetenskaps- och Vitterhets-Samhället (KVVS) - ledamöter avlidna 2013 (i tidsföljd): Jan Hult, Bertil Åkesson, Bengt Rundblad, Ingemar Fernlund, Jan Ling

Minnesteckningar över avlidna ledamöter 2010. Särtryck ur KVVS Årsbok 2011

Minnesteckningar. Kungl. Vetenskaps- och Vitterhets-Samhället - ledamöter avlidna 2010. Bengt Holmberg, Gunilla Åkerström-Hougen, Gunnar Harling, Jan S. Nilsson, Ulf Lagerkvist, Erik Frykman, Sigvard Rubenowit

Asperger syndrome, autism and attention disorders: a comparative study of the cognitive profiles of 120 children.

The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) was applied (in a Swedish version) in 120 children with Asperger syndrome, autistic disorder, and attention disorders. Using stepwise logistic regression analysis, the WISC\u27s discriminating ability was investigated. The overall rate of correct diagnostic classification was 63%. Further, WISC profiles were analysed within each group. The group with autistic disorder was characterised by a peak on Block Design. The Asperger syndrome group had good verbal ability and troughs on Object Assembly and Coding. The group with attention disorders had troughs on Coding and Arithmetic. The results suggest that Kaufman\u27s Verbal Comprehension, Perceptual Organisation and Freedom from Distractibility factors rather than verbal IQ and performance IQ account for the variance on the WISC. Furthermore, the Asperger syndrome and autistic disorder groups differed in respect of "fluid" and "crystallised" cognitive ability

Asperger syndrome, autism and attention disorders: a comparative study of the cognitive profiles of 120 children.

The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) was applied (in a Swedish version) in 120 children with Asperger syndrome, autistic disorder, and attention disorders. Using stepwise logistic regression analysis, the WISC\u27s discriminating ability was investigated. The overall rate of correct diagnostic classification was 63%. Further, WISC profiles were analysed within each group. The group with autistic disorder was characterised by a peak on Block Design. The Asperger syndrome group had good verbal ability and troughs on Object Assembly and Coding. The group with attention disorders had troughs on Coding and Arithmetic. The results suggest that Kaufman\u27s Verbal Comprehension, Perceptual Organisation and Freedom from Distractibility factors rather than verbal IQ and performance IQ account for the variance on the WISC. Furthermore, the Asperger syndrome and autistic disorder groups differed in respect of "fluid" and "crystallised" cognitive ability