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Theory of mind in recognizing and recovering communicative failures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2016

FRANCESCA M. BOSCO  and
ILARIA GABBATORE Open the ORCID record for ILARIA GABBATORE [Opens in a new window]
FRANCESCA M. BOSCO*
Affiliation:
University of Turin and Neuroscience Institute of Turin
ILARIA GABBATORE
Affiliation:
University of Oulu
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Francesca M. Bosco, Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Via Po 14, 10123 Turin, Italy. E-mail: francesca.bosco@unito.it
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Abstract

We analyzed the role played by theory of mind (ToM) in children's ability to recognize and repair different kinds of communicative failures. In particular, we analyzed three different kinds of communicative failures: failure of the expression act, communicative meaning, and communicative effect. We administered videotaped stories, in which people act out a communicative failure and first- and second-order ToM tasks, to 120 children ranging in age from 3.5 to 8.5 years. The children showed a trend of increasing difficulty in managing the communicative failures investigated. Moreover, children's ToM ability is partially correlated with recognition and repair of a communicative task; however, it is not able to explain the trend of difficulty we detected. We suggest that the factor better explaining such trend is the increasing complexity of the mental representations underlying the three different kinds of failures.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 57 - 88
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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