Theory of mind in preschool conversation : an investigation of 3- and 5-year-old Singaporean preschoolers via daily conversation with peers.

• Main Author: Chua, Hui Ping.
• Other Authors: Qu Li
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Psychology::Applied psychology
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/38535
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Theory of mind (ToM) development in 3- and 5-year-old Singaporean preschoolers was examined with reference to desires, beliefs and emotions. These categories relate to universal notion that ToM develops in this order (Vinden, 2001). The specialty of this study is its bilingual participants, as previous works mainly focused on monolingual children. Naturalistic observations of preschoolers‟ conversations were recorded using mainly paper-and-pen method. Utterances containing the three categories, and attribution to self and others were coded. One-way ANOVAs was used to tabulate the results. Two hypotheses supported the notion that understanding beliefs is slower than desires but faster than emotions. The third hypothesis that ToM is not only about understanding one self, but also the others, was also supported at p<.05.