幼兒心智理論發展與語言發展之關係─漢語心智動詞與補語句法之檢視

Abstract

本研究旨在檢視幼兒心智理解能力的發展與其對漢語心智動詞與補語句法的理解之間的關係。研究以60名以漢語為母語的四歲幼兒為對象，進行「智力測驗」、「一般語言能力測驗」、「補語句法理解作業」以及「心智理解作業」的施測，結果發現在控制了「社經背景」、「年齡」、「智力」以及「一般語言能力」之後，幼兒「對補語句法的理解」可以有效預測其在「心智理解作業」上的表現，且不受主要動詞是否為「心智動詞」的影響。顯示幼兒語言發展與幼兒心智理論的發展之間主要的關連是發生在補語句型所提供的「語法架構」而非對「心智動詞」語意的理解上，其解釋力並超越了一般語言能力的影響。根據研究發現針對目前幼兒心智理論發展與語言發展之間關係的主要爭議進行討論，並提出對未來我國兒童心智理論研究的建議。

This research examined the relationship between children’s development of Theory of Mind(TOM) and their understanding of Chinese mental verbs and complements. Sixty Chinese–speaking 4-year-old children accepted Tony’s nonverbal IQ test, general language test, complement-understanding tasks and TOM tasks. Results showed that children’s complement-understanding effectively predicted their performance on TOM tasks after controlling for SES, age, IQ score and general language comprehension, no matter the main verb was mental verb or not . These findings led to the conclusion that it is the complement structure but not the meaning of mental verbs contributing uniquely to the development of children ’s Theory of Mind . Some discussion and suggestions were proposed according to the findings of this research.