SLI poor performance in Theory of Mind tasks: linguistic delay, mental attribution impairment or problem with task loads?

摘要

Pragmatic skills involve language abilities but also theory-of-mind (ToM) and integrating information from the context. Sometimes children with specific language impairment (SLI) show poor performance of in ToM tasks, but it is not clear if it's a consequence of a structural-linguistic problem, a ToM impairment or a problem with the task loads. Therefore, the aim of this study is to compare two groups of children with SLI and different degrees of pragmatic impairment, in their ToM profiles using communicative oriented tasks. Three groups of children (age:4-7) were compared in different ToM tasks: 11 children with common SLI (cSLI), 9 children with SLI plus pragmatic impairments (pSLI) and an age-matched control group. Results revealed that all groups were similar in emotion understanding, where the context was structured. However, pSLI group showed poorer performance than cSLI group when tasks were communicative oriented, and they needed to adapt their speech to a specific context.