Children Pretend Games, Applications And Psychological Development Of The Theory Of Mental State Terms

Young children's Theory of Mind (ToM) has become a hot issue in cognitive development since last two decades. The research themes related to ToM involve a wide range. Recently, many studies have been focusing on conceptualizing the roles pretense and language play in preschoolers' ToM development.There are several ways in exploring young children's pretense. One common view is to observe their spontaneous pretend play in natural settings. Besides, the semantic aspect of language that may contribute to ToM problem mainly involves the using of mental terms, and pretend play is fertile in soliciting such applications. General verbal ability contributes to ToM development as well. Based on the above concerns, this study is to explore the possible relations between preschoolers' false belief understanding and their general verbal ability, their pretend play and the using of mental terms during pretend play.Fifty-seven 3-5-year-olds from two local kindergartens are involved in this study. All subjects are videotaped for pretend play and measured upon MSCA-CR Verbal Test and standard false belief tasks. Pretend play is coded for 8 categories: object substitution, imaginary play, personification, role assignment, role extension, role play, joint proposal and discussion of pretense. Using of mental terms is categorized as: genuine references to mental states, idioms, conversational use, expression of intention/desire or other references. The results indicate that:a) Age has main effects on preschoolers' false belief understanding and general verbal ability.b) After control for age, there is still a positive correlation between preschoolers' false belief understanding and general verbal ability.c) Preschoolers' using of mental terms is different from pretend context to non-pretend context, and has a developmental orientation from desire to belief.d) After control for certain factors, preschoolers' false belief understanding is significantly related to their performance on specific categories of pretend play, such as object substitution, personification and role assignment.e) After control for certain factors, preschoolers' false belief understanding is significantly related to their using of mental terms and the specific category of "idioms"; The correlation with the using of genuine references to mental states is no longer significant.