Budget Amount *help |
¥2,600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,600,000)
Fiscal Year 2001: ¥1,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000)
Fiscal Year 2000: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
Fiscal Year 1999: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
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Research Abstract |
Autistic, mentally retarded, and normal children were tested on their development of language and executive functional memory, as well as their theory of mind abilities. In 1999 and 2000, normal 3- to 6-year-olds' false belief understanding, sentence comprehension, and metalinguistic awareness were compared with mentally retarded and autistic individuals'. In 2001, 4- to 7-year-olds received not only theory of mind tests on false belief, representational change, and sources of their knowledge but also tests of source memory, temporal order, working memory, and free and cued recall. First, normal children's sentence comprehension and phonemic, word, and grammatical awareness developed largely between 4 and 6 years. Autistic children showed impairments in their false belief understanding and metalinguistic awareness as compared with normal and mentally retarded children with lower verbal ages. In sentence comprehension, autistic individuals were sensitive to event probability levels as we
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re normal 3- and 4-year-olds, whereas mentally retarded individuals were not. Moreover, in normal and mentally retarded populations, but not in autistic population, false belief understanding was related to metalinguistic word awareness. Results suggest that autistic and mentally retarded individuals' language development differs from normal children's and that at least in normal and mentally retarded children, both false belief understanding and word awareness are based on a metarepresentational ability. Second, although children's executive functional memory, as well as their theory of mind abilities, developed between 4 and 7 years, 4-year-olds' source memory nearly showed floor effects whereas their memory of temporal order and working memory did not do so. Furthermore, children's understandings of representational change and sources of their knowledge were correlated with source memory and free recall. Results suggest that autonoetic consciousness involved in source memory and free recall underlies some but not all of theory of mind abilities. Less
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