Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c4f8m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T20:26:07.078Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Minds in action: Evidence that linguistic diversity helps children build a theory of mind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 August 2021

Vanessa Díaz Open the ORCID record for Vanessa Díaz [Opens in a new window]
Vanessa Díaz*
Affiliation:
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, United States
*
Address for correspondence: Vanessa Diaz Williams Hall 890 Drillfield Dr. Virginia Tech Blacksburg, VA24061United States E-mail vdiaz@vt.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Reports suggest that the development of a child's understanding of the mind (ToM) is enhanced in bilingual children. This is usually ascribed to different features of executive functioning (EF), though there is not a lot of empirical support for that position. Instead, published studies suggest an association between linguistic processes such as sociolinguistic sensitivity, metalinguistic awareness, language proficiency, and bilinguals’ ToM development. Coupled with evidence that bilinguals rely more on person-intention cues and show enhanced abilities to repair breakdowns in communication compared to monolinguals, this paper presents the argument that navigating sociolinguistic environments with agents differing in linguistic knowledge helps bilingual children develop an enhanced ToM. Additionally, this review includes relevant literature on deaf children and cultural variations and ToM, which are indicative of other situations in which contextual variants, especially those that are linguistically mediated, have an impact on the development of ToM that is independent of EF.

Keywords

bilingualismtheory of mindfalse-belief reasoningsociolinguistic sensitivityexecutive functioning
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , January 2022 , pp. 70 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aksu-Koç, A (1988) The Acquisition of Aspect and Modality: The Case of Past Reference in Turkish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baillargeon, R, Scott, RM and He, Z (2010) False-belief understanding in infants. Trends in cognitive sciences 14(3), 110–118.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Baron-Cohen, S, Leslie, AM and Frith, U (1985) Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”?. Cognition 21(1), 37–46.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ben-Zeev, S (1977) The influence of bilingualism on cognitive strategy and cognitive development. Child development 1009–1018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berguno, G and Bowler, DM (2004) Communicative interactions, knowledge of a second language, and theory of mind in young children. The Journal of Genetic Psychology 165(3), 293–309.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E (2009) Bilingualism: The good, the bad, and the indifferent. Bilingualism: Language and cognition 12(1), 3–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E (2015) Bilingualism and the development of executive function: The role of attention. Child development perspectives 9(2), 117–121.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E and Barac, R (2012) Emerging bilingualism: Dissociating advantages for metalinguistic awareness and executive control. Cognition 122(1), 67–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E, Luk, G, Peets, KF and Yang, S (2010) Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 13(4), 525–531.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E and Senman, L (2004) Executive processes in appearance–reality tasks: The role of inhibition of attention and symbolic representation. Child development 75(2), 562–579.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Blom, E, Kuntay, AC, Messer, M, Verhagen, J and Leseman, P (2014) The benefits of being bilingual: Working memory in bilingual Turkish-Dutch children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 128C, 105–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bloom, P and German, TP (2000) Two reasons to abandon the false belief task as a test of theory of mind. Cognition 77(1), B25-B31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brown, JR, Donelan-McCall, N and Dunn, J (1996) Why talk about mental states? The significance of children's conversations with friends, siblings, and mothers. Child development 67(3), 836–849.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Buttelmann, D, Over, H, Carpenter, M and Tomasello, M (2014) Eighteen-month-olds understand false beliefs in an unexpected-contents task. Journal of experimental child psychology 119, 120–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Byers-Heinlein, K and Fennell, CT (2014) Perceptual narrowing in the context of increased variation: insights from bilingual infants. Developmental Psychobiology 56(2), 274–291.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Byers-Heinlein, K, Morin-Lessard, E and Lew-Williams, C (2017) Bilingual infants control their languages as they listen. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201703220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Byers-Heinlein, K and Werker, JF (2009) Monolingual, bilingual, trilingual: infants' language experience influences the development of a word-learning heuristic. Developmental Science 12(5), 815–823.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Byers-Heinlein, K and Werker, JF (2013) Lexicon structure and the disambiguation of novel words: Evidence from bilingual infants. Cognition 128(3), 407–416.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlson, SM and Moses, LJ (2001) Individual differences in inhibitory control and children's theory of mind. Child development 72(4), 1032–1053.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Carlson, SM, Moses, LJ and Breton, C (2002) How specific is the relation between executive function and theory of mind? Contributions of inhibitory control and working memory. Infant and Child Development: An International Journal of Research and Practice 11(2), 73–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Champoux-Larsson, MF and Dylman, AS (2018) A prosodic bias, not an advantage, in bilinguals' interpretation of emotional prosody. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 1– 9.Google Scholar
Cheung, H, Mak, WY, Luo, X and Xiao, W (2010) Sociolinguistic awareness and false belief in young Cantonese learners of English. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 107(2), 188-194.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cox, SR, Bak, TH, Allerhand, M, Redmond, P, Starr, JM, Deary, IJ and MacPherson, SE (2016) Bilingualism, social cognition and executive functions: A tale of chickens and eggs. Neuropsychologia 91, 299–306.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cummins, J (1978) Bilingualism and the development of metalinguistic awareness. Journal of cross-cultural psychology 9(2), 131–149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dahlgren, S, Almén, H and Dahlgren Sandberg, A (2017) Theory of mind and executive functions in young bilingual children. The Journal of Genetic Psychology 178(5), 303–307.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Devine, RT and Hughes, C (2014) Relations between false belief understanding and executive function in early childhood: A meta-analysis. Child Development 85(5), 1777–1794.Google ScholarPubMed
Diaz, V and Farrar, MJ (2018a) Do bilingual and monolingual preschoolers acquire false belief understanding similarly? The role of executive functioning and language? First Language 38(4), 382–398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diaz, V and Farrar, MJ (2018b) The missing explanation of the false-belief advantage in bilingual children: a longitudinal study. Developmental Science 21(4), e12594.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engel de Abreu, PM (2011) Working memory in multilingual children: Is there a bilingual effect? Memory 19, 529–537.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fan, SP, Liberman, Z, Keysar, B and Kinzler, KD (2015) The exposure advantage: Early exposure to a multilingual environment promotes effective communication. Psychological Science 26, 1090–1097.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Farhadian, M, Abdullah, R, Mansor, M, Redzuan, MA, Gazanizadand, N and Kumar, V (2010) Theory of mind in bilingual and monolingual preschool children. Journal of Psychology 1(1), 39–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, JA (1992) A theory of the child's theory of mind. Cognition. 44(3), 283–296.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goetz, PJ (2003) The effects of bilingualism on Theory of Mind development. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 6, 1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, KR (2016) High proficiency across two languages is related to better mental state reasoning for bilingual children. Journal of Child Language 43, 407–424.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Greenberg, A, Bellana, B and Bialystok, E (2013) Perspective-taking ability in bilingual children: Extending advantages in executive control to spatial reasoning. Cognitive development 28(1), 41–50.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Han, S and Lee, K (2013) Cognitive and affective perspective-taking ability of young bilinguals in South Korea. Child Studies in Asia-Pacific Contexts 3(1), 69–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kovács, Á. M. (2009) Early bilingualism enhances mechanisms of false-belief reasoning. Developmental Science 12(1), 48–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kovács, Á. M. and Mehler, J (2009) Cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 106, 6556–6560.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kyuchukov, H and De Villiers, J (2009) Theory of Mind and evidentiality in Romani-Bulgarian bilingual children. Psychology of language and Communication 13(2), 21–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, K, Olson, DR and Torrance, N (1999) Chinese children's understanding of false beliefs: The role of language. Journal of Child Language 26, 1–21.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lehtonen, M, Soveri, A, Laine, A, Järvenpää, J, de Bruin, A and Antfolk, J (2018) Is bilingualism associated with enhanced executive functioning in adults? A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin 144(4), 394–425.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Liberman, Z, Woodward, AL, Keysar, B and Kinzler, KD (2017) Exposure to multiple languages enhances communication skills in infancy. Developmental science 20(1), e12420.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Meristo, M, Falkman, KW, Hjelmquist, E, Tedoldi, M, Surian, L and Siegal, M (2007) Language access and theory of mind reasoning: evidence from deaf children in bilingual and oralist environments. Developmental Psychology 43(5), 1156.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Milligan, K, Astington, JW and Dack, LA (2007) Language and theory of mind: Meta-analysis of the relation between language ability and false-belief understanding. Child Development 78, 622–646.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Milosky, LM and Ford, JA (1997) The role of prosody in children's inferences of ironic intent. Discourse Processes 23(1), 47–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nguyen, TK and Astington, JW (2014) Reassessing the bilingual advantage in Theory of Mind and its cognitive underpinnings. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 17, 396–409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Onishi, KH and Baillargeon, R (2005) Do 15-month-old infants understand false beliefs?. Science 308(5719), 255–258.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Paap, KR, Johnson, HA and Sawi, O (2015) Bilingual advantages in executive functioning either do not exist or are restricted to very specific and undetermined circumstances. Cortex 69, 265–278.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Papafragou, A and Ozturk, O (2007) Children's acquisition of modality. In Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA 2) (pp. 320–327). Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Perner, J and Roessler, J (2012) From infants’ to children's appreciation of belief. Trends in cognitive sciences 16(10), 519–525.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Perner, J, Stummer, S, Sprung, M and Doherty, M (2002) Theory of mind finds its Piagetian perspective: Why alternative naming comes with understanding belief. Cognitive development 17(3–4), 1451–1472.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubio-Fernández, P (2017) Why are bilinguals better than monolinguals at false-belief tasks?. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 24(3), 987–998.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rubio-Fernández, P and Glucksberg, S (2012) Reasoning about other people's beliefs: Bilinguals have an advantage. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 38, 211–217.Google ScholarPubMed
Sabbagh, MA, Xu, F, Carlson, SM, Moses, LJ and Lee, K (2006) The development of executive functioning and theory of mind: A comparison of Chinese and US preschoolers. Psychological Science 17(1), 74–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schick, B, de Villiers, P, de Villiers, J and Hoffmeister, R (2007) Language and theory of mind: A study of deaf children. Child Development 78(2), 376–396.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schroeder, SR (2018) Do bilinguals have an advantage in theory of mind? A meta-analysis. Frontiers in Communication 3, 36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, LS, Pascalis, O and Nelson, CA (2007) A domain-general theory of the development of perceptual discrimination. Current Directions in Psychological Science 16(4), 197–201.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Smithson, L, Paradis, J and Nicoladis, E (2014) Bilingualism and receptive vocabulary achievement: Could sociocultural context make a difference?. Bilingualism: language and Cognition 17(4), 810–821.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomasuolo, E, Valeri, G, Di Renzo, A, Pasqualetti, P and Volterra, V (2012) Deaf children attending different school environments: Sign language abilities and theory of mind. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 18(1), 12–29.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Walker, EA, Ambrose, SE, Oleson, J and Moeller, MP (2017) False Belief Development in Children Who Are Hard of Hearing Compared With Peers With Normal Hearing. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 60(12), 3487–3506.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wellman, HM, Fang, F, Liu, D, Zhu, L and Liu, G (2006) Scaling of theory-of-mind understandings in Chinese children. Psychological Science 17(12), 1075–1081.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wermelinger, S, Gampe, A and Daum, MM (2017) Bilingual toddlers have advanced abilities to repair communication failure. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 155, 84–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wimmer, H and Perner, J (1983) Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception. Cognition 13(1), 103–128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yow, WQ and Markman, EM (2007) Monolingual and bilingual children's use of the mutual exclusivity assumption and pragmatic cues in word learning. Poster presented at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Boston, MA.Google Scholar
Yow, WQ and Markman, EM (2011a) Young bilingual children's heightened sensitivity to referential cues. Journal of Cognition and Development 12(1), 12–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yow, WQ and Markman, EM (2011b) Bilingualism and children's use of paralinguistic cues to interpret emotion in speech. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 14(4), 562–569.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yow, WQ and Markman, EM (2015) A bilingual advantage in how children integrate multiple cues to understand a speaker's referential intent. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 18(3), 391–399.CrossRefGoogle Scholar