一般發展幼兒及輕度泛自閉症幼兒心智理論與母親心智言談

Maternal Talk on Mental States and the Theory of Mind in Typically Developing Children and Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

本研究主要目的在探討一般發展幼兒和輕度泛自閉症幼兒心智理論的表現，一般發展幼兒和輕度泛自閉症幼兒的母親在親子共讀活動時的心智言談方式，以及母親心智言談方式與其子女心智理論表現的關係。研究對象為兩組四歲至六歲幼兒及其母親，其中20位為輕度泛自閉症幼兒、20位為一般發展幼兒。為控制兩組幼兒的語言能力，本研究採用修訂畢保德圖畫詞彙測驗先評估幼兒的語言能力。之後安排兩組幼兒接受心智理論測驗個別施測，測驗內容包括七項作業，分別是相異欲望、相異信念、知識取得、內容錯誤相信、明確錯誤相信、信念-情緒、及真實-表面情緒。此外，並請幼兒與其母親共同閱讀一本圖畫故事書-鼠小弟捉迷藏，共讀過程加以錄音。本研究採用兒童語料交換系統所統一使用的CHAT格式，進行共讀錄音語料的轉譯和編碼。編碼分析的重點包括親子共讀圖畫書時心智言談的種類、方式及故事主題的維持度，編碼單位為語句。本研究的主要發現有三：一、輕度泛自閉症幼兒在心智理論測驗得分和一般發展幼兒相比，明顯較低。二、輕度泛自閉症幼兒母親在親子共讀時總心智言談出現的次數和頻率，以及心智言談種類的平均數都較一般發展幼兒的母親明顯較低。三、輕度泛自閉症幼兒和一般發展幼兒在心智理論測驗的得分，與其母親在親子共讀時出現的心智言談次數和頻率都達到顯著相關。本研究結果可供泛自閉症幼兒及一般發展幼兒的父母和教師參考，具有教育和臨床應用的價值。

This study investigated the (1) theory of mind in typically developing children and in children with autism spectrum disorders, (2) mental state discourse in mother-child conversation during joint book reading, and (3) relationship between the theory-of-mind understanding of children and mothers' talk on mental states. Methods: Forty Mandarin Chinese-speaking children aged 4 to 6 years and their mothers living in Taipei, Taiwan participated in this study. Among the children, 20 were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), 10 children with high-functioning autism and 10 children with Asperger syndrome, and 20 were typically developing children. To control the language abilities of the two groups of children, each child was first administered the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revisited (PPVT-R; Lu & Liu, 1994). No significant difference was observed in the PPVT-R scores between the two groups. The two groups of children were then tested on seven tasks from various aspects of theory-of-mind understanding: diverse desire, diverse belief, knowledge access, content false belief, explicit false belief, beliefemotion, and real-apparent emotion (Wellman & Liu, 2004). The children were also asked to read a storybook entitled The Younger Rat Plays Hide and Seek with their mothers. The mother-child conversations during joint book reading were tape-recorded, transcribed, and coded into seven categories of mental state discourse: simple cognition, cognition clarification, simple affect, affect clarification, simple perception/attention, perception/ attention clarification, and false belief ending (Slaughter, Peterson, & Mackintosh, 2007). The unit of coding was utterance. A coder separately coded 8 of 40 randomly selected transcripts. Cohen's kappa statistic was used to test the interrater reliability of cod ing. The result of the interrater agreements for coding was 94%. Results/Findings: Three main results were obtained in this study: (1) The ASD children scored significantly lower on the theory-of-mind test compared with the typically developing children. (2) The raw frequencies and percentages of the mental state talk produced by mothers who had ASD children were significantly lower than those by mothers whose children were typically developing. (3) Significant correlations between the performance of children on the theory- of-mind test and maternal mental state talk in both groups were observed. For the typically developing children, simply describing mental states and emotional feelings without explaining the causes of those mental states and feelings in maternal utterances was not related to the performance of the children on the theory-of-mind test. Instead, elaborations on the causes or sources of mental states and emotional feelings were significantly correlated with the theory-of-mind understanding of the children. By contrast, for the ASD children, significantly positive correlations were observed between all types of mental state talk produced by their mothers and the performance of the children in the theory-of-mind tasks. Conclusions/Implications: This study investigated the relationships between the theory-of-mind understanding of children and their mothers' talk on mental states during joint book reading. The results of this study can provide educational and clinical suggestions for parents and teachers of children with ASD and typically developing children.