Language and theory of mind how early exposure to sign language

							     Language and theory of mind: how early exposure to sign language impacts on deaf
                 children’s metacognitive development and solving skills.

Cyril Courtin & Anne-Marie Melot
UMR 6095 – CNRS – CEA, Equipe développement et fonctionnement cognitifs, Universités de Caen
et Paris V

Theory of mind development is now an important research field in deaf studies. These studies
are generally aimed at determining the role of language in developing cognitive
representations. Past research with deaf children has consistently reported a delay in theory of
mind development in deaf children born to hearing parents, while performances of second-
generation deaf children are more problematic, with some contradictory results. That is, some
authors have reported equal performances between second generation deaf children and
hearing ones, while some other researchers (Courtin & Melot, 1998; Courtin, 2000…) have
reported better performances in second generation deaf children compared to hearing ones on
the false belief attribution task.

The present study was aimed at exploring further this discrepancy, testing the metacognitive
abilities of deaf children on two tasks, the appearance – reality task ( Flavell et al., 1983) and
the classic false-belief task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983; Hogrefe, Wimmer & Perner, 1986).

Twenty-eight second-generation deaf children, 60 deaf children of hearing parents and 36
hearing children, aged 5 to 7 year-old, have been tested and compared on 3 appearance-reality
and 3 false-belief items.

Results show that early exposure to language, be it signed or oral, facilitates performance on
the two „Theory of Mind‟ tasks. Deaf children of hearing parents clearly lag behind hearing
children. However, it does not seem that these groups of children develop in a way which
differs from each other. That is, the metacognitive development of deaf children of hearing
parents is delayed but follows the same pattern as the one of hearing children.

The performance of second generation deaf children, who are native signers, equals this of
hearing children in the appearance-reality task. But second generation deaf children
outperform hearing ones on the false-belief task. This difference of performance pattern,
which could reflect a difference in the way these two groups of children develop some theory
of mind, is discussed in terms of linguistic and metarepresentational development. It is
suggested that the apparent early success of second generation deaf children on the false-
belief task may not be the proof of an earlier maturity in metacognitive development. Rather,
this early success may result from the usage of some unusual solving skill processes in the
false belief task by deaf children, native signers, processes which would be in straight relation
with sign language syntactic features (e.g., “role taking”, Poulin & Miller, 1995).

The discussion will be completed with some data collected from on-going work aimed at
exploring further how early exposure to sign language leads to differences in success
according to theory of mind tasks.
References

Courtin, C. (2000). The impact of sign language on the cognitive development of deaf
        children: the case of theories of mind. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 5,
        266-276.
Courtin, C. & Melot, A;-M. (1998). Development of theories of mind in deaf children. In M.
        Marschark & M.D. Clark (Eds.), Psychological perspectives on deafness, Vol.2 (79-102).
        Mahwah, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Flavell, J.H., Flavell, E.R., & Green, F.L. (1983). Development of appearance-reality distinction.
        Cognitive Psychology, 15, 95-120.
Hogrefe, G.J., Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1986). Ignorance versus false belief: A developmental
        lag in attribution of epistemic states. Child Development, 57, 567-582.
Poulin, C., & Miller, C. (1995). On narrative discourse and point of view in Quebec Sign
        Language. In K. Emmorey, & J.S. Reilly (Eds.), Language, gesture, and space, (pp. 117-
        131). Hillsdale, Lawrence Erlbaum.
Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs : Representation and constraining
        function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception. Cognition, 13,
        103-128.