Bartjan Hollebrandse

Indicators of theory of mind in narrative production: a comparison between individuals with genetic syndromes and typically developing children.

It is a matter of debate whether the development of theory of mind (ToM) depends on linguistic development or is, rather, an expression of cognitive development. The study of genetic syndromes, which are characterized by intellectual impairment as well as by different linguistic profiles, may provide useful information with respect to this issue. The present study compares indicators of ToM in the narrative production of individuals with Cornelia de Lange syndrome, Down syndrome, Williams syndrome and typically developing children, matched on sex and mental age. Statistical comparisons of data obtained from a qualitative analysis of the narrative production of the different groups confirm the presence of distinctive patterns, mainly related to the effective use of personal pronouns. The analysis of correlations among story‐telling variables and other cognitive and linguistic variables suggests that the relationship between language development, cognitive development, and the emergence of ToM cannot be reduced to unidirectional causal links.

Empirical Results and Formal Approaches to Recursion in Acquisition

We argue that the move from Direct recursion with conjunctive interpretation to Indirect recursion, where the Strong Minimalist Thesis requires that, at Phase boundaries, a semantic interpretation is necessary, provides the blueprint for the acquisition path. We provide an overview of experimental results on the early acquisition (3–4 years) of recursion for PP’s(“on the shelf in the jar”).Adjectives (“big little tractor”) simple compounds (“christmas tree cookie”), and later acquisition (5–7 years) for sentences (“I think you said they gonna be warm”) and verbal compounds (tea-pourer-maker) where language particular factors play a role. Various other factors, branching direction, Relativized MInimality, and morphology must be integrated by the child into the grammatical mechanism. We argue that they cause PP, Adjective, and simple Compounds to be acquired early (3–4 years) and Sentential and Verbal compounds to be acquired late. The fact that subtle steps in acquisition can be captured by very abstract syntactic principles should be seen as a strong source of support for linguistic theory, and an important basis for applied work.