4-, 5-, and 7- Year-Old Children's Understanding and Performance of Intentions in the Intention-Comprehension Task

• Main Authors: Li-Hui Tseng, 曾莉惠
• Other Authors: Shu-Chen Chien
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/53129627330941363210

碩士 === 國立臺北教育大學 === 幼兒教育學系碩士班 === 94 === The main purpose of this study was to investigate the developmental trend of children’s understanding of intentions. The correlation between children’s linguistic ability and their false-belief understanding was proved by most previous research on theory of mind, but the relation between children’s linguistic ability and their intention understanding wasn’t so far. For the reason stated above, another purpose of this study focused on the relation between children’s intention understanding and their language ability. In this study, the designed intention-comprehension task, revised from Schult’s experiments in 2002, comprised a story-comprehension task and a shooting-game task to assess the ability of distinguishing intentions and desires of subjects among 60 children aged 4, 5, and 7. Both tasks had four situations. Two of them were〝intention-fulfilled/desire-satisfied〞and 〝intention-unfulfilled/desire-unsatisfied〞combined as a 〝match situation,〞and another two were 〝intention-unfulfilled/desire-satisfied〞and 〝intention-fulfilled/desire-unsatisfied〞combined as a 〝mismatch situation.〞 The results were as follows: 1. Although 4- and 5- year-old children had the intention-understanding ability, they were not mature in the development of intention-understanding ability. Only 7-year-old children performed best. 2. All subjects had higher scores in the mismatch situation of the story-comprehension task than of the shooting-game task. The difference between means was .55(p＝.034). Therefore, we inferred that there were few differences between self- and other-intention understanding ability. 3. When 4- and 5- year-old children failed in the mismatch situation, the mistaken strategies they used in different situations were not the same, such as desire-outcome matching strategy or assumption of character’s mental states…etc. The most often used mistaken strategy was desire-outcome matching strategy. 4. The multiple regression analysis showed that the linguistic ability is a better predictor in the performance of intention-comprehension task. 27﹪of the variance of linguistic ability was explained, yet only 15.3﹪of the variance of age was explained. At the end of this study, five suggestions were made for future research.