Developmental relations between Turkish preschool children's theory of mind skills and their ability to track character references in narrative discourse

Abstract

This thesis investigates the developmental relationship between young children’s theory of mind (ToM) abilities and their competence in organizing narratives through character references, to see how ToM contributes to the emergence of the narrative skills. For this purpose, narrative competence of 75 Turkish speaking children (ages 3;0 to 6;0) was assessed; focusing on how adequately they refer to characters in different discourse contexts where mutual knowledge was blocked: i) story-retelling, ii) picture-elicited stories with 1MC and 2MC, iii) picture-elicited story acted out with toys. For the assessment of ToM skills, children were presented with the tasks scaled by Wellman & Liu (2004). In addition, working memory (WM) measures were included as control variables. It was hypothesized that children’s adequate use of referential expressions in all types of discourse would increase with age and ToM development would be positively related to referential adequacy. A one-way MANOVA revealed that except for the story-retelling, referential adequacy performances in different story contexts increased with age; 4 and 5-year-olds performed better than 3-year-olds. Also, children refer more adequately to characters in stories with 1MC than in stories with 2MC. Hierarchical regression analyses show that forward word span performance was positively associated with referential adequacy in story-retelling. ToM skills were also positively associated with referential adequacy in 1MC stories while the association between ToM skills and referential adequacy in 2MC stories was marginally significant. Finally it has been found that WM performance was positively and strongly associated with ToM skills. Following the adequacy analyses, the specific linguistic forms Turkish children are using in their narratives for introduction, maintenance and reintroduction functions were examined. Age and story type affected the patterns for using different linguistic forms. Three-year-old children were not yet capable of using indefinite forms for introducing characters; instead, they mostly used zero pronouns and on some occasions bare noun phrases. The use of bare noun phrases increased with age and almost 50% of children used bare noun phrases for the first character introductions in all story types except story retelling in which the proper name was used as it was given when the story was first told. The use of indefinite noun phrases began to appear at ages four and five. When maintaining reference to the same character, children in all age groups preferred using zero pronouns. In addition, children mainly used zero pronouns for character reintroductions and age-related increase in the use of definite forms for reintroduction function was not observed in any of the story types.