A ToM Study On Moderate Mental Retarded Children

The study on Theory of Mind (ToM), as an important topic of children's social cognitive development, has become popular since 1980s. There have been a lot of ToM studies focused on children's belief, consciousness, emotions and social conmunications and all these studies have chosen normal children as objectives. Nowadays there has been a new tendency in ToM research, in which most researchers begin to explore the ToM development among disabled children.The ToM study on disabled children has a short history, the study on mental retarded children(MR) is incomplete. This paper includes three classical types of experiments, that is false-belief understanding task, pretense-reality distinction task, and task involving deception. The paper tries to explore the ToM development of moderate MR children and makes comparison with normal children. The paper has supposed that there must be a lot of differences between moderate MR children and normal ones, also among moderate MR children, so the paper tries to make it clear in order to give some effective informations and references in the course of education.Based on the study, the paper concluded that:First, the moderate MR children's ToM development is sharply delayed, the key time of moderate MR children's ToM development may be from 12 to 16, while normal children have finished there basic ToM development by 5 years old.Second, the paper doesn't find differences caused by gender in the moderate MR children's ToM development.Third, there is relationship between intelligence development and ToM development, also school educetion and verbal ability may have great affection on moderate MR children's ToM development.The last, family structure and social conmunication may also effect moderate MR children's ToM development.