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Developing communicative competence: a longitudinal study of the acquisition of mental state terms and indirect requests*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2014

HANNAH DE MULDER
HANNAH DE MULDER*
Affiliation:
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, University of Utrecht, the Netherlands
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Abstract

This longitudinal study involving 101 Dutch four- and five-year-olds charts indirect request (IR) and mental state term (MST) understanding and investigates the role that Theory of Mind (ToM) and general linguistic ability (vocabulary, syntax, and spatial language) play in this development. The results showed basic understanding of IR and MST in four-year-olds, but full understanding had not been reached even at five years old. Furthermore, although ToM predicted both IR and MST when linguistic ability was not taken into account, this relationship was no longer significant once the language measures were added. Linguistic ability thus seems to play an important role in the development of both IR and MST. Additional analyses revealed that whereas syntactic ability was the primary predictor of IR, spatial language was the best predictor of MST, suggesting that IR relies primarily on general linguistic skills, but that more specific aspects of language may bootstrap MST.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 42 , Issue 5 , September 2015 , pp. 969 - 1005
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

[*]

I would like to thank the children and staff of the following schools: Dr H. Pierson (Rotterdam), De Margriet (Rotterdam), Prinses Beatrix (Rotterdam), and De Overlaet (Rosmalen) for their participation and collaboration. I am very grateful to Peter Coopmans and Frank Wijnen for their help and support in all aspects of this study. Ellen Hamaker kindly helped me with the statistical aspects of this paper. Thanks also go to Anne-Marit van Dam, Aster Dijkgraaf, Lilian van der Geugten, Floor Landa, Renske Maes, Lea ter Meulen, Miranda Nelck, Marthe Rottier, Annette Watzema, and Lisanne van Weelden for their assistance during the experiments.

References

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