ISSN : 1229-0718
This study examined the relationship between language and false belief in Korean children with autism (n=14). Specifically, it aimed to explore whether understanding of sentential complement structures could predict performance on false belief tasks in Korean children with autism. The children were tested with two kinds of false belief tasks (i.e., location change and content change tasks) and three kinds of language tasks (i.e., complement structure with a mental verb (think), complement structures with a communication verb (say), and relative clause structures). The tasks were presented as short stories with picture descriptions on a laptop computer. Questions were asked after each short story presentation. The data showed that the Korean children with autism performed lower than the typically developing Korean children did. Furthermore, multiple regression analyses indicated that the understanding of complement structures with a mental verb (think) predicted false belief task performance. But understanding of complement structures with a communication verb (say) and the relative clause comprehension were not predictive. The results support the view of de Villiers that false belief task performance is preceded by understanding of sentential complement structure. The lower performance of the Korean autistic children can also be interpreted as evidence that supports Baron-Cohen's theory of mind deficit hypothesis of autism.
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