Die Bedeutung hinter der Bedeutung verstehen - Entwicklung von Theory-and-Mind (ToM) und Sprache bei hörgeschädigten Kindern

The participants are 20 normal hearing children (aged 2;11-5;6 years) and 20 profoundly deaf children (hearing loss 90 dB or greater; hearing age of 2;11-5;6 years). They are investigated in the following fields by the following methods: • cognition (SON-R 2½ -7, subtests categories, ana¬lo¬gies, situations) • theory-of-mind development: set of tasks following the German version of the scale of Wellman/Liu (2004) – see (Kristen, Thoermer, Hofer, Aschersleben, & Sodian, 2006) • understanding of sentence complements under different functional conditions (Perner et al., 2003, Perner et al., 2005) • resolution of formally simple referring expressions considering divergent models of reality – replication of the study of (Robinson & Mitchell, 1992) • questionnaire to evaluate the social conditions of the hearing impaired children Children´s test performances will be statistically analysed. Results are going to be interpreted with an eye on the study by Perner et.al. (2003). The overall scientific target of this project is to gain deeper insights into the development of the theory-of-mind (ToM) of normal hearing and profoundly deaf German-speaking children. In more detail we want to find out • if the course of development of theory of mind in normal hearing and profoundly deaf German-speaking children follows the stages as described in Wellman/Liu (2004) (for a German translation see (Kristen, Thoermer, Hofer, Aschersleben, & Sodian, 2006)); • if the functional conditions of children´s understanding of the truth values of complemet clauses of ToM-verbs are alike in both groups • if the course of development of resolving formally quite simple referring expressions considering divergent models of reality is the same in both groups. Because of their delayed language acquisition the investigation of profoundly deaf children can provide important insights into the interaction of the developmental processes of language and theory-of-mind. Furthermore the results can give valuable hints how these children can be supported in their early acquisition of pragmatically adequate language use and hence successful communication.