Social Cognition, Language Acquisition and The Development of the Theory of Mind

By Jay L. Garfield, C. Peterson, T. Perry. 2001

259 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the cognitive achievement that enables us to report our propositional attitudes, to attribute such attitudes to others, and to use such postulated or observed mental states in the prediction and explanation of behavior. Most normally developing children acquire ToM between the ages of 3 and 5 years, but serious delays beyond this chronological and mental age have been observed in children with autism, as well as in those with severe sensory impairments. We examine data from studies of ToM in normally developing children and those with deafness, blindness, autism and Williams syndrome, as well as data from lower primates, in a search for answers to key theoretical questions concerning the origins, nature and rep- resentation of knowledge about the mind. In answer to these, we offer a framework according to which ToM is jointly dependent upon language and social experience, and is produced by a conjunction of language acquisition with children's growing social understanding, acquired through conversation and interaction with others. We argue that adequate language and adequate social skills are jointly causally sufficient, and individually causally necessary, for producing ToM. Thus our account supports a social developmental theory of the genesis of human cognition, inspired by the work of Sellars and Vygotsky.

Subfields: Cultural Studies, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/789432a45faa682b1e7ef7486217ab2bd148df68

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Citations in the corpus

Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds (2008, unknown): “But although natural language clearly subserves and catalyzes normal human cognition, there is compelling evidence that the human mind is distinctively human even in the absence of normal natural language sentences (see Bloom 2000; Garfield et al. 2001; Siegal et al. 2001).”
The neural bases of social cognition and story comprehension. (2011, background): “F or p er so na l u se o nl y. PS62CH05-Mar ARI 22 November 2010 9:29 work with normally developing children (Astington & Jenkins 1999) and abnormally developing children (Garfield et al. 2001).”
Constructing an understanding of mind: The development of children's social understanding within social interaction (2004, background): “…some terms and details may differ, it is best located within an existing group of social constructivist explanations of children’s developing understanding of mind (e.g., Boyes et al. 1997; Dunn 1996b; Fernyhough 1996; Garfield et al. 2001; Harris 1999; Montgomery 2002; Nelson 1996; Shatz 1994).”
Getting Vygotskian about theory of mind: Mediation, dialogue, and the development of social understanding (2008, unknown): “Vygotskian concepts are also employed by Garfield, Peterson, and Perry (2001) in their examination of the connections between mentalizing development and language acquisition.”
The interactive brain hypothesis (2012, background): “, 1956; Bateson, 1972; Brüne, 2003; Burns, 2006) and autism (Hobson, 2002), and the role of language and dialogical processes (including implications for cognitive functions, such as planning and formal reasoning) (Garfield et al., 2001; Carpendale and Lewis, 2004; Symons, 2004; Fernyhough, 2008).”
Is the mind really modular (2005, background): “Moreover, individual differences in belief attribution are highly correlated with language skills and exposure to social interaction (Garfield et al., 2001).”