Development Of Theory Of Mental Retarded Children With Down Syndrome

The Children’s theory of mind is the basis for children’s social cognition and interpersonal communication. It is the ability to describe, assign and attribute certain mental states(including desires, beliefs, intentions,emotions, etc.) of others, and predict and explain the corresponding action. This paper emprically studied the development of theory of mind on children with Down Syndrome. We tried to probe its development characteristics and influencing factors, which may provide emprical evidence for training on socialization, intervention and education.Mental retardation is a generalized disorder with impaired intellectual functioning and deficit in adaptive behaviors. Down Syndrome is the most common genetic types of congenital mental retardation.10%-15%of the mental retarded children is diagnosed with Down Syndrome. The incidence of the newborns is about1/750. The number of Down Syndrome is increasing with26000more cases each year. Nowadays, there are about600000patients with Down syndrome in China.We selected28children between8-18of age with Down Syndrome as subject, and41normal children between4-6of age as control group. We measured the children individually their theory of mind and verbal ability with2research tests. The first is revised false belief task, the second is Peabody picture vocabulary test.The study draw the following conclusions:1, deverlopment of theory of mind on children between8-18years of age with Down Syndrome lag behind that of normal children. Even at15years of age, the level of theory of mind of those with Down Syndrome is lower than that of normal children at4years of age. But their theory of mind also develops with age.2, For the children with Down Syndrome, the development of theory of mind starts at8years of age, the pace of development increase after14years of age.3, For the children with Down Syndrome, the development of theory of mind shows significant diference among age groups. The senior group is significantly better than middle and low age groups. The gender difference is not significant.4, For the children with Down Syndrome, the theory of mind developed with the verbal ability improved. The result shows the positive corelation between verbal ability and theory of mind.5, the difficulty of tests distinguish the level of development, whiile the performance on first order false belief task is much better than that of second order false belief task.