Mental Representation and Language Access: Evidence from Deaf Children with Different Language Backgrounds

Sammanfattning: The ability to identify with others and to understand that they have minds of their own is the cornerstone of human interaction. In the last 25 years there has been a large amount of research done on the development of mentalizing skills and an ongoing debate exists about the nature of acquiring these skills. In the present work we investigated how mentalizing skills among deaf children are affected by their access to language at home and at school. The deaf children recruited either grew up in deaf families using sign language as their native language, or were reared by hearing parents and were consequently delayed in their linguistic development. Some of the children attended a school following the oralist method, where children are taught to talk and lip-read and where sign language is avoided. Another group of children attended a school with a bilingual approach, where sign language is employed for classroom instructions and where spoken language is taught as a second language. In Study I 75 deaf children in Estonia and Sweden between the ages of 6 and 16 were compared on a battery of mentalizing tasks concerning others? beliefs and emotions. In study II we examined the relationship between three kinds of mentalizing skills and the level of dominance of sign language modality. The same Estonian deaf children as in study I were compared to an Estonian hearing comparison group. The results show that, when it comes to mentalizing abilities, the deaf children of deaf parents who attend a school prioritizing education in sign language outperform the native signers from an oralist school and the deaf children from hearing homes attending either a bilingual or an oralist school. There were significant correlations between children?s mentalizing skills and the level of dominance of their primary language modality. Being more biased towards the sign language modality is thus related to better performance on the mentalizing tasks. Taken together, our results emphasize the importance of continuous access to fluent conversations in a shared language between the child and those closest to him or her, both at home and at school, for the development of age appropriate mentalizing skills in deaf children.