ToM in Autism & Language Development Flashcards

Brief Review of Lecture 6 & Lecture 7 Part 1

ToM Assessment: Early False Belief Tasks

• False Belief Task (Action-Prediction task):

  • Example: Sally-Anne Task.
  • Question: "Where does Sally think the marble is?"

• Videos:

  • Sally-Anne & Smarties Tasks (4-year-olds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41jSdOQQpv0
  • Appearance-Reality Task: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEpu3dC5W70

ToM Assessment: Present

• Anticipatory looking paradigm
  • Senju et al., 2010
    • Anticipatory Looking in autism
    • Video: Familiarisation
    • Video: False Belief 2 (FB2; higher memory load)

Autism Profile (ASC)

• Diagnostic traits:

  • Socialisation
  • Communication
  • Behaviour (special interests/intense focus)

• Non- diagnostic traits:

  • Atypical perception / Unique cognitive & sensory abilities

• Intrinsically related

• Interested in the role of ToM in children’s difficulties in socialisation & therefore communication

• Mostly Talents; some interference with daily life

• False Belief Task: ASC

  • VIDEO
  • 7-year-old
    *Senju et al., 2010 Anticipatory Looking in autism
  • Results & Conclusions
    • Although typically developing children correctly anticipated the action, children with ASC failed to show such action anticipation.
    • The results suggest that children with ASC have an impairment in false belief attribution, which is independent of their verbal ability.

Considerations

• Baron-Cohen et al.'s (1985, 1986) results:
  • Isolated difficulties with ToM tasks to the autism group
• Why did a handful of children with ASD pass the ToM tasks?
  • This could be related to language abilities, which vary greatly in ASD - the samples in Baron-Cohen et al. (1985, 1986) were not well matched on Verbal IQ.
• Can children with ASC form meta-representations, independently of ToM abilities?
  • Needs to be tested.
  • If the ability to form meta-representations is independent of ToM, what could you conclude?
    • Failure on ToM tasks cannot be due to the more global ability to form mental representations

ToM and Language: Converging Evidence

Second Order False Belief Task

• Happè, 1994, 1995
  • Example: Where does Mary think that John thinks the chocolate is?
    • TD children pass this task around 6-7 years of age
    • Children with ASD who pass the standard FB task don’t pass second order tasks until much later, but not all of them do!
    • When children with ASD pass either tasks, they tend to have a VIQ of 120-140. TD children pass the tasks by the time they have a VIQ of 80 (as well as at a much younger age).
  • Conclusions
    • Children with autism may use alternative strategies to pass FB tasks, which are based on verbal intelligence – this improves as they get older.
    • It is not clear whether performance shows an understanding of mental states.

Stages in Language Acquisition

• Are there universal stages to language acquisition?
  • Around 12 months single words As speakers of all languages go through these developmental stages, without receiving formal instruction and regardless of the environmental input, this is strong evidence in support of the idea that language development is supported by an innate biological timetable.
  • Around 24 months two-word utterances
    • Subject and object & Noun and verb, always have a place, even in rudimentary two-word utterances.
      • Examples: mummy throw; baby eat; I hungry!
    • Between 2-5 years of age, language develops into complex sentences
    • By age 4 we produce plurals and other forms of speech such as interrogatives
    • By age 5-6 years children speak pretty much like adults do

Language learning in deaf children

• Children born deaf often have hearing/speaking parents, who try to teach lip-reading rather than give training in sign language
  • Critical Issues
    • If they did, that would be very strong evidence in support of the idea that language development is supported by innate, biological mechanisms.
    • These children have no environmental input: they can’t hear spoken language, and can’t learn sign language due to lack of exposure to it
    • How does linguistic development proceed in these children?
    • Are there brain structures/innate mechanisms in place that will enable communicative abilities to develop?
    • Do they invent a language despite the lack of input?
    • Goldin-Meadow et al. (1978, 1984) 1-4 year olds
      • Procedure
        • 10 subjects
        • Tested at age 1 year and followed up through to 4 years of age
      • Results
        • 1 year: spontaneous production of gestures to communicate (equivalent to the one-word utterances of their hearing peers)
        • 2 years: production of sequence of gestures to communicate as hearing peers do with two- to three-word utterances
        • Example: child points to chicken on dinner table, extends palm (give), points at self (me), gestures to mouth (eat)
        • Sentence structure of noun & verbs maintained – the syntactic structure was not observed in caretakers and therefore not taught
  • Conclusions
    • Yes, up to about 2 years of age, linguistic development proceeds in line with a biological timetable
      • Comments
        • Unfortunately, this is where it ends
        • Beyond the age of 2 years, language acquisition requires environmental input

Language learning in blind children

• Does language learning require visual experience?
  • Critical Issues
    • Example: Can children born blind learn abstract words, or words denoting entities that are not tangible?
    • Some of the words that sighted children learn first are words denoting non- tangible entities (e.g. mountain, cloud, bird). Do blind children learn these words, at an early age?
    • What about verbs? Verbs are usually said to require visual experience in TD children – they can’t usually be learned by pointing, for example, as nouns are.
    • Are the stages of language acquisition found in typical development also found in blind children?
    • Yes, stages at 1-2 years respected (i.e. one & two-three word utterances)
      • Landau & Gleitman (1985) 1-4 year olds
        • Typical findings
          • Correct learning of non-tangible and abstract words (e.g. mountain)
          • Verbs learned in the absence of visual experience. In particular, verbs such as look and see, which are among the first TD children learn, are also the first blind children learn
          • This shows that the blind and sighted share a representation for "look" that means "perceive", whilst the particular modality of perception differs.
          • “Look up!”
            • Panel A: The blind child responds by raising her hands
            • Panel B: The sighted/blindfolded child responds by raising her eyes
        • Conclusions
          • Evidence from blind children provides further support for the idea that there is a biological basis to language development

Language learning in extreme deprivation

• Isobelle
  • Isolated by deranged mother until 6 years
  • No linguistic input until after 6th birthday
  • At 6 years, low IQ and linguistic skills equivalent to a 2-year-old
  • After just one year of exposure, (7 years), language abilities largely equivalent to 7-year-old peers.
    • Early in life, exposure time is irrelevant to learning outcomes
    • The 6-yo could catch up
    • Note that bilingual children learn two languages at the same time. On the assumption that they hear one language half the time, and the other half the time, again, exposure time early on in life does not seem to matter to the course of linguistic development
    • Conclusions & Comments (Davies, 1947) PS34320: Lecture 4
• Genie
  • Isolated by deranged father until 13 years
  • No linguistic input until after 13th birthday
  • Despite all efforts, language development never approached typicality.
  • Mostly developed skills equivalent to those of a 2-year-old
    • Maturational state is important, but so is environmental input
    • Conclusions (Curtiss, 1977)

Critical/Sensitive Period

• There appears to be a sensitive period to learn language. Six years is late but not too late. Thirteen years is too late.

  • What do deprivation studies teach us?
  • Is the lack of environmental input causing delays in ToM development, and as a consequence delays in language development (as well as vice-versa?)
  • CRITICAL QUESTION

• Genie Video

Contemporary applications of ToM research methods

• ToM, social & language development
  • False belief understanding (FBU) and social competence
    • Studies have shown that social development varies cross-culturally. Among some cultures, FBU seems to develop more slowly. Children aged 5-10 years have been tested. Those with better false belief understanding at 5 years of age also have greater social competence as they grow up into their teens (e.g., Slaughter & Perez-Zapata, 2014; Callaghan et al., 2005).
  • FBU and play
    • FBU is typically better in children who engage in assigning roles and making joint plans in play contexts, suggesting that promoting this kind of behaviour in early development can significantly improve social competence and social development (e.g., Jenkins & Astington, 2000).
  • FBU and family contexts (the ‘sibling effect’)
    • FBU is typically better in children with siblings, suggesting that children benefit from this kind of social interaction in early social development (e.g., Perner, Ruffman, & Leekam, 1994; Lewis, Huang, & Rooksby, 2007; Devine & Hughes, 2018).
  • False belief understanding (FBU) and parenting styles
    • Studies have shown that children growing up with parents (esp. mothers) who frequently use emotion words and talk about emotions to their children at a young age, show better FBU, which emphasises the role of parenting in social competence (e.g., Pavarini, de Hollanda Souza, & Hawk, 2013; Tompkins, Benigno, Kiger Lee, & Wright, 2018).
  • FBU and attachment
    • Studies have shown children with secure attachment styles have better emotion understanding at 3 years of age (e.g., Raikes & Thompson, 2006 ), and better FBU at 4 years of age (e.g., Meins, Fernyhough, Russell, & Clark-Carter, 1998).
  • FBU and Mind-mindedness
    • Children with parents who treat them as a person with a mind, rather than a person with just needs, will talk to them as such. This in turn contributes positively to social development, social understanding, and has been linked to better performance on false belief tasks (Meins, 1999; Meins et al., 2002; Meins et al., 2013; Devine & Hughes, 2018).
  • FBU and peer interaction
    • Studies have shown that better FBU early in childhood is associated with greater popularity during secondary school teenagers and later peer relationships (e.g., Peterson & Siegal, 2002; Slaughter, Imuta, Peterson, & Henry, 2015).
  • FBU in deaf children
    • Studies have shown that deaf children who have little opportunity to develop language are likely to suffer in their FBU. This emphasises the importance of language development in theory of mind and social competence (e.g., de Villiers & de Villiers, 2000; Peterson, 2021; Schick, de Villiers, de Villiers, & Hoffmeister, 2007; Woolfe, Want, & Siegal, 2002).
  • False belief understanding and autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
    • Studies in autism still use false belief tasks to assess social understanding.

Take Home Message!

• ToM and Language are inseparable. They develop concurrently and influence one another’s depth and breath of knowledge and understanding of the social world. The contributions of nature and nurture in this developmental process cannot be separated .