The Relationship between Question Acquisition and Theory of Mind Development

• Main Author: 鐘玉秝
• Other Authors: 郭怡君
• Language: zh-TW
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/67517857788248907132

碩士 === 國立嘉義大學 === 外國語言學系研究所 === 103 === ABSTRACT Children begin to ask questions around two years old. Meanwhile, during the preschool years, children make rapid progress in the understanding of minds (Wellman, Cross, and Watson, 2001). Children who ask questions must believe the other person knows the answer they don’t know. This study investigated whether the question acquisition and theory of mind development have the relationship or not. There are two kinds of questions. One is yes-no questions and the other is Wh-questions. In English, yes-no questions were used most frequently. And, children start to ask yes-no question in the very beginning. Wh-question is difficult to produce because Wh-questions are classified according to the position from which the Wh phrase has moved, while this movement is absent in Mandarin. Li and Thompson (1981) listed four grammatical devices that may be used to pose Mandarin questions. These are particle questions, disjunctive questions, A-NOT-A questions, and question word questions. No paper seems to have analyzed the relationship between theory of mind and Mandarin question acquisition. Therefore, the present study aims to analyze the relationship between the theory of mind and question acquisition by Taiwanese preschoolers. In addition, I also analyzed what kind of question is most frequently used by Taiwanese preschool children. It is unknown what kind of question is most frequently used. The data were spontaneous speech, question elicitation task, and theory of mind tasks. There were total sixty participants aged from 4 to 6. The result showed that preschoolers who had theory of mind ability produced more questions than preschoolers who had no theory of mind. In addition, Taiwanese preschoolers tended to ask more yes-no questions than Wh-questions. In conclusion, question acquisition and theory of mind development has the close relationship. This study has important implication for child development.