Bilingualism: Language and Cognition

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Language and Cognition:

The effects of bilingualism on theory of mind development

PEGGY J. GOETZ
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition / Volume 6 / Issue 01 / April 2003, pp 1 - 15 DOI: 10.1017/S1366728903001007, Published online: 12 May 2003

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1366728903001007 How to cite this article: PEGGY J. GOETZ (2003). The effects of bilingualism on theory of mind development. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, pp 1-15 doi:10.1017/S1366728903001007 Request Permissions : Click here

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Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 6 (1), 2003, 115

2003 Cambridge University Press DOI: 10.1017/S1366728903001007

The effects of bilingualism on theory of mind development*

P E G G Y J. G O E T Z
Calvin College

This research examines whether an individuals linguistic knowledge, either as a speaker of a particular language or as a bilingual, inuences theory of mind development. Three- and four-year-old English monolinguals, Mandarin Chinese monolinguals, and Mandarin-English bilinguals were given appearance-reality, level 2 perspective-taking, and false-belief tasks. All children were tested twice, a week apart; the bilinguals were tested in each of their languages. The 4-year-olds in each group performed signicantly better than the corresponding 3-year-olds. Both monolingual groups performed similarly on the tasks, and the bilinguals performed signicantly better than the monolingual groups, although when the two testing times were examined separately, they had only a near-signicant tendency to perform better at the second testing time. Possible explanations for this evidence of a bilingual advantage are greater inhibitory control, greater metalinguistic understanding, and a greater sensitivity to sociolinguistic interactions with interlocutors.

The study of childrens developing social cognition has lately been dominated by research investigating childrens understanding of the mind. Adults, it is argued, generally depend on an explanatory framework, a theory of mind, when they interpret other peoples behaviors in terms of internal mental states such as intentions, beliefs, and desires. The standard false-belief task, a critical test for theory of mind understanding, was used by Wimmer and Perner (1983) to examine childrens abilities to predict the thoughts or behavior of someone holding a false belief. In this unexpected transfer false-belief task, children are told that a boy puts chocolate in box A. In his absence his mother takes the chocolate from box A and puts it into box B. The children are then asked where the boy will look for the chocolate when he returns. According to Wimmer and Perners interpretation, only when children can represent the boys wrong belief separately from what they know themselves to be reality, will they be able to pass the task. A related false-belief task was designed by Hogrefe, Wimmer and Perner (1986). In this unexpected contents task, children were asked about the false belief of someone who had not seen the unexpected contents of a box; Hogrefe et al. found that 3- and 4-year-olds pattern of performance was similar to that demonstrated in Wimmer and Perners unexpected transfer task. Since then, false* This research is based in part on a dissertation submitted in partial fulllment of the requirements for the Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. I wish to thank the members of my dissertation committee, Marilyn Shatz, Susan Gelman, Teresa Sattereld, and San Duanmu, for providing thoughtful input and encouragement. I am also grateful to my assistants, Hu Ping, Sheri Lee, and Wang Xiu Zhen. This research was supported by dissertation grants from the Linguistics Program, Psychology Department, and Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

belief tasks have been manipulated in various ways, and the general pattern of a developmental shift occurring in theory of mind understanding from the ages of 3 to 4 has been found to be very robust. Researchers have now begun to investigate factors throughout childrens development that may be precursors to the ability to attribute mental states to people. Some investigators have looked for correlations with childrens developing emotional and social understanding (Astington and Jenkins, 1995; Dunn, 1995), and still others have focused on the way in which childrens developing language abilities aid them in gaining an understanding of mind, whether through the acquisition of mentalstate words, particular syntactic constructions, or the pragmatics of conversational discourse (Shatz, Martinez, Diesendruck and Akar, 1995; deVilliers and Pyers, 1996). Childrens executive functioning, particularly their inhibitory control, has also been proposed as an essential developmental precursor to their understanding of mind (Russell, Jarrold and Potel, 1994; Carlson and Moses, 2001). Perhaps a majority of researchers have argued that younger children have a mentalistic psychological theory based on non-representational desires and perceptions which progressively changes to a mental representational theory (Perner, 1991; Gopnik and Wellman, 1994; Flavell and Miller, 1998). Recently, proponents of the executive function position as well as those who argue that children undergo a genuine conceptual change to a representational theory of mind have pointed out that executive function and conceptual difculties may interact with one another (Carlson and Moses, 2001; Wellman, Cross and Watson, 2001). Previous work in a number of areas indicates that comparing the abilities of monolingual and bilingual

Address for correspondence CAS Department, Calvin College, 3201 Burton Street, S.E., Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4388, USA. E-mail: pgoetz@calvin.edu

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Peggy J. Goetz tease out the aspects of bilingualism which account for this advantage and seek to assess how this advantage relates to the various explanations for theory of mind development. A secondary point of interest concerns the possible inuence of differing languages on theory of mind development. Because the bilingual children must be compared with monolingual children from each of their language groups, the two monolingual groups (Englishspeaking and Mandarin Chinese-speaking) must also be compared to determine if one of these particular languages or cultures confers an advantage in theory of mind development. Two studies (Chen and Lin, 1994; Lee, Olson and Torrance, 1999) have examined theory of mind development in Mandarin-speaking children, but no studies have yet directly compared the performance of monolingual Mandarin-speaking children to monolingual English-speaking children. Thus, this study examines whether an individuals linguistic knowledge, either as a speaker of a particular language or as a bilingual, inuences theory of mind development and, if it does, what that inuence might be. This question was investigated by comparing the performance of children from three language groups (English monolingual, Mandarin Chinese monolingual, and Mandarin-English bilingual) on a series of theory of mind-related tasks. The monolingualbilingual comparison focuses on the possible inuence of bilinguals experiences of interacting with conversational partners whose linguistic knowledge may differ from their own, and the two monolingual comparisons examine whether linguistic or cultural variations might differentially inuence theory of mind development. A context for this study will be provided in the following review of relevant studies in both the theory of mind and the bilingual literature. Theory of mind and language research Although the developments in an understanding of the mind have been studied from infancy on to adulthood, much of the research has focused on 3- and 4-yearolds, and a majority of this research has examined how children of this age perform on false-belief and other, related tasks. The three general areas that people have theorized may inuence the development of theory of mind are the biological maturation of an innate theory of mind module or other information-processing abilities, such as executive function (Baron-Cohen, 1991; Leslie, 1994; Riggs, Peterson, Robinson and Mitchell, 1998); childrens developing social awareness and interactions with others (Youngblade and Dunn, 1995; Ruffman, Perner, Naito, Parkin and Clements, 1998); and the facilitating characteristics of the syntactical, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of language (Astington and Jenkins, 1995; de Villiers and Pyers, 1996).

children to pass such tests may be particularly revealing. One type of evidence comes from research which has shown a cognitive and metalinguistic advantage of bilingual children over monolingual children. Although empirical studies in this area have given mixed results, a number of them have detailed various cognitive advantages of the bilingual child over the monolingual child, advantages such as metalinguistic ability (Ben-Zeev, 1977; Bialystok, 1988) and pragmatic awareness (Genesee, Tucker and Lambert, 1975; Hakuta, 1987). Metalinguistic awareness could help children develop the understanding that an object or event can be represented in more than one way, and this understanding of metarepresentation might inuence childrens theory of mind development. Another aspect of metalinguistic ability, described by Bialystok (1988, 1992, 1999) in relation to bilingual children, is the importance of the control of linguistic processes in dealing with ambiguous problems. An advantage of this sort might also aid children in dealing with theory of mind-related tasks since these tasks often involve conicting representations and salient distractions. Thus, the metalinguistic advantage described in the bilingual literature might affect bilingual childrens theory of mind understanding by affecting their metarepresentational understanding or their selective control of linguistic processes. The second type of studies relating to this issue are those which examine bilingual childrens languagemixing and their differentiation of their two language systems. Numerous researchers (Arnberg and Arnberg, 1992; Genesee, Nicoladis and Paradis, 1995; De Houwer, 1996) have noted that most bilingual children mix elements of their two languages in the same utterance, but recent research (Lanza, 1992, Genesee et al., 1995; Genesee, Boivin, and Nicoladis, 1996) has shown that even very young bilingual children (one- and twoyear-olds) can use the appropriate language with their interlocutors. Bilingual children such as those in this study, who do not begin learning their second language until they are exposed to it in a daycare situation, may be especially struck by the importance of matching their language to their linguistic partners and situations. If bilingual children are aware that they must pay attention to the linguistic knowledge of other people because their interlocutors sometimes do not know the same languages that they know, then bilingual children may have an advantage over monolingual children in understanding that other people have mental states that could differ from their own. Thus, bilinguals are an interesting test case for looking at whether sociolinguistic demands can affect the cognitive abilities involved in passing theory of mind tasks. The primary focus of this study is to determine whether bilingual children do indeed perform better than monolingual children on a series of theory of mind-related tasks. If this result is found, future studies may be able to

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Bilingualism and theory of mind development This research focuses primarily on linguistic and sociolinguistic inuences on theory of mind development, inuences that obviously relate primarily to the second and third of the above mentioned areas; however, they could conceivably interrelate with the information-processing abilities of the rst area as well. Because the bilingual children of this study began language learning in a Mandarin home environment and were then put into an English-speaking environment through daycare, they were forced to deal with a second language, a second way of representing entities they had been previously learning to represent differently. These children have also been learning that they must use these two linguistic systems appropriately according to their conversational partners. Language has been the focus of a variety of studies that relate to childrens understanding of mind. A number of researchers interested in the connection between language and theory of mind have focused on childrens acquisition of mental and desire terms. Shatz, Wellman and Silbers (1983) study of 2-year-olds looked at the frequency and function of mental verbs, such as think and know. They found that the average age for childrens rst use of mental verbs was 2;2, and the usage thereafter increased for all children. A number of studies have gone on to tie childrens mental verb use or understanding with their ability to pass a false-belief task (Moore, Pure and Furrow, 1990; Gale, de Villiers, de Villiers and Pyers, 1996). A few cross-cultural studies have looked at how differences in a specic languages system of mental verbs may affect childrens acquisition of theory of mind. Unlike English, in which only the neutral word think would commonly be used in false-belief questions, some languages regularly mark false-belief states with specic mental verbs. Shatz et al.s (1995) study of Turkish-, Puerto-Rican Spanish-, Brazilian Portugueseand English-speaking children and Lee et al.s (1999) study of Mandarin-speaking children both found some evidence that children performed better on false-belief tasks when a more explicit false-belief term was used rather than a neutral mental state verb. In a study of Junin Quechua, a language which usually refers to concepts such as thought and belief indirectly by using the verb say and is thus particularly lacking in explicit mental language, Vinden (1996) found that 4- to 8-year-old Junin Quechua children performed poorly on tests of false belief. Although the main goal of this study is the monolingualbilingual comparison, the rst comparison to be discussed will be whether differences between the Mandarin and English speakers could inuence theory of mind acquisition. If there is no difference between the performance of the Mandarin- and Englishspeaking monolinguals, then specic language and cultural differences between the two groups would not be

likely to affect theory of mind development. Such results would concur with many of the other cross-cultural studies (Avis and Harris, 1991; Shatz et al., 1995), which together are used to argue for the likelihood of some kind of universal development. If, as expected, the monolinguals do not differ in theory of mind performance, the bilingual monolingual comparison can then be pursued with the assumption that neither the use of English nor the use of Mandarin by itself confers a signicant benet to the bilingual child in terms of theory of mind development. The Chinese language itself is particularly interesting, in relation to theory of mind, because the Mandarin Chinese system of mental state verbs can also mark falsebelief states. The only two studies of Mandarin-speaking childrens performance on false-belief tasks (Chen and Lin, 1994; Lee et al., 1999) have produced somewhat contradictory results, and neither of these studies also tested English-speaking children in order to compare their performance directly with Mandarin-speaking children. Chen and Lins (1994) study of Mandarin-speaking childrens performance on storybook versions of the unexpected transfer task and a fairly standard version of the unexpected contents task found that all the children (2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds) performed rather poorly with no signicant difference between the older and younger age groups. The highest rate of passing for a single test was only 50% for the older group; however, the age ranges of the groups used (2;6 to 3;6 and 3;6 to 4;6) began at younger ages than is usual for these tests (3;0 to 3;11 and 4;0 to 4;11), and the storybooks used were also more complicated than the standard false-belief story. In contrast, the other Mandarin false-belief study (Lee et al., 1999) found the usual signicant difference between their 3- and 4-year-olds. They were interested primarily in the childrens performance with three different types of mental verbs that mean think (xiang3, yi3wei2, and dang4; the numbers represent tones), and they found that the use of specic mental verbs with false belief connotations (yi3wei2 and dang4) signicantly improved the childrens performance in comparisons with trials that used the more neutral verb, xiang3. When they asked the child to predict an individuals actions without using a mental verb (as is done in this study), the 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds performances were all generally within the ranges of those reported for children of Western cultures (3-year-olds, 35% passing; 4-year-olds, 69% passing; 5-year-olds, 85% passing). Thus, a direct comparison between the performances of Mandarin-speaking children and English-speaking children is needed to clarify whether the reported poor performance of Chinese children in Chen and Lins study is due only to their age ranges, and to test directly for a difference between the two languages and cultures with the same methods and materials.

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Peggy J. Goetz in understanding that two different people can represent an object differently from different perspectives. Thus, these types of tasks look at the problem of being able to represent an object in two different ways that may seem mutually incompatible and contradictory. Bilingual children, however, are very familiar with the notion of dual coding on a linguistic level. If these tasks test a general ability to recognize that one object can be represented or coded in different ways, it seems likely that bilingual children should perform better than monolingual children because of their experience with this concept in the linguistic realm. The second reason that bilinguals metalinguistic skills might affect their theory of mind development relates to the suggestion that most 3-year-old children have not yet developed the inhibitory control to deal with the conicting or distracting information given to them in theory of mind-related tasks (Russell et al., 1994; Carlson and Moses, 2001). Bialystoks (1988, 1992, 1999) framework of development in bilinguals focuses on two skill components of metalinguistic tasks, analysis of linguistic (representational) structures and control of linguistic processes. The rst, the analysis of linguistic knowledge, is an important factor in gaining an awareness of syntax, solving correction problems, and understanding the arbitrariness of language. The second component, control of linguistic processes, refers to the ability to selectively attend to certain aspects of a representation, especially when a problem contains ambiguity, distracting information, or conicting representations. Recent studies (Bialystok and Codd, 1997; Bialystok and Majumder, 1998; Bialystok, 1999) have found that bilingual children do have an advantage in tasks which require high levels of control. Bialystok and Codd (1997, p. 89) note that the need for this control is most obvious when a problem contains ambiguity, salient distracting information, or two conicting representations. Childrens performance on theory of mind-related tasks has been analyzed as being problematic for children in just this way, particularly by those who think that children three years old and younger have an excessive reality orientation or that children may be limited in their ability to inhibit dominant responses (Flavell and Miller, 1998, p. 872). A different line of bilingual research that may relate to theory of mind development are those studies which give evidence for the importance of bilinguals developing sociolinguistic knowledge. Bilingual children living in a culture in which bilingualism is not the norm will need to learn to adjust the language they speak according to the languages of their various conversational partners. For example, the bilingual children in this study were initially confronted with a new linguistic system in a daycare environment, and they have since been required to interact with individuals in each of their languages. Thus, the realization that they must pay attention to the

Bilingual research Conversations with siblings and peers are natural opportunities for children to have their rst experiences with teasing, conict, and other linguistic interactions which would give them evidence for others intentions and beliefs. In a monolingual environment, these linguistic interactions are part of one system for the child. Although there have been some cross-cultural studies of children focusing on how different languages or environments may affect the development of theory of mind (Avis and Harris, 1991; Chen and Lin, 1994; Shatz et al., 1995; Vinden, 1996), no studies have looked at how bilingual childrens theory of mind may be affected by their acquisition of two language systems and their sociolinguistic interactions with speakers of their two languages. Two different lines of research with bilingual children indicate that they may be particularly interesting subjects for theory of mind studies. The rst investigates whether bilingual children have an advantage over monolingual children in particular metalinguistic or cognitive skills. There are two basic reasons for suspecting that bilinguals metalinguistic abilities might relate to their theory of mind abilities. First, metalinguistic skills have been of interest to theory of mind researchers who view theory of mind development as relating to questions of metarepresentation (Doherty, 2000). Since bilinguals must learn to refer to the same concept in two ways, many researchers have examined bilinguals awareness of their lexicons and their sense of the arbitrariness of language for evidence of a bilingual metalinguistic advantage. Although these studies have produced mixed results, there is some evidence for a bilingual advantage in understanding the arbitrariness of language (Ben-Zeev, 1977; Cummins, 1978), making certain syntactic judgments (Bialystok, 1988; Galambos and GoldinMeadow, 1990), and in their sensitivity to giving and receiving feedback in communication tasks (Genesee et al., 1975; Ben-Zeev, 1977; Hakuta, 1987). This possible metalinguistic advantage is interesting in relation to theory of mind because false-belief tasks and the other theory of mind-related tasks of this study (appearance-reality and perspective-taking) have all been interpreted as problems of metarepresentation. The ability tested in all of them is an awareness that there are different ways of representing, that the same object or event can be represented in different ways by the same person and by different people (Flavell, Green and Flavell, 1986; Gopnik and Astington, 1988). The series of appearance-reality studies by Flavell and his associates (Flavell, Flavell and Green, 1983; Flavell et al., 1986) have shown that 3to 4-year-old children develop an understanding that a deceptive object (such as a sponge that looks like a rock) can appear to be one thing when it really is something else; perspective-taking tasks show a similar development

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Bilingualism and theory of mind development linguistic knowledge of others is of great importance in their developing sociolinguistic competence. There has recently been increasing evidence that bilingual children are aware of the need to match their language to others by their second year. In examining whether bilingual children give evidence of being able to differentiate their languages by selecting the appropriate language for their interlocutor or context, a number of studies (Lanza,1992; Genesee et al., 1995; Genesee et al., 1996) found that even 1- and 2-year-old bilinguals clearly made language choices according to the person they were talking to. Much of this evidence has come from studies whose initial focus was the question of when bilingual children were able to differentiate their two linguistic systems. There is little debate about whether these Mandarin-English bilingual children have differentiated their two languages at the ages of 3 and 4. Nevertheless, the research concerning the question of bilinguals language differentiation has led researchers to claims that the decrease in bilinguals language mixing during their second year, rather than resulting from the childrens increasing ability to differentiate their two language systems, comes instead from their increasing ability to use language choice as a strategy of bilingual pragmatic competence (Meisel, 1989; Arnberg and Arnberg, 1992). Bilinguals developing ability to adjust to their partners language abilities may be tied to their understanding that other people may have different knowledge than their own, and as these abilities seem to develop in bilingual children particularly during their second and third years, they may inuence their awareness of others thoughts and beliefs as well. Childrens recognition that other people cannot understand one of their languages may lead them to adjust their theories about other peoples knowledge or intentions, and so bilingual children may have an advantage over monolingual children in sorting out these problems of intention and perspective. Thus, there are three major reasons to suspect that bilingual children may perform better on theory of mind-related tasks than monolingual children. First, an increased metalinguistic awareness of dual representations may help children in developing the representational abilities that are proposed to be involved in theory of mind understanding. Second, greater control of linguistic processes for selective attention may produce greater inhibitory control, which has also been proposed as a key factor in theory of mind development. Finally, their developing sociolinguistic competence, resulting from the increased salience of their interlocutors linguistic knowledge, may increase their awareness of the ways in which the knowledge and beliefs of others can differ from their own. Since a bilingual advantage in the theory of mind-related tasks of this study could be explained by any of these three possibilities, this study will not be able to determine which of these explanations is most accurate. It

is only designed to show whether any of these arguments would be feasible by asking whether bilingual children really do perform better than monolingual children. Future studies will then have to be designed to follow up on the possible reasons for this advantage. In summary, this study looks at how linguistic knowledge of two types, knowledge of a particular language and knowledge of two languages, affects childrens developing theory of mind. It was hypothesized that the monolingual Mandarin-speaking children and the English-speaking children would perform very similarly on all theory of mind-related tasks since the majority of cross-cultural studies have produced these results. In contrast, it was predicted that the bilingual children would perform signicantly better than both groups of monolinguals on the theory of mind-related tasks. Method Participants A total of 104 children were tested with comparable numbers of males and females in each group. 32 of the children were monolingual English speakers, 32 were monolingual Mandarin Chinese speakers, and 40 were bilingual Mandarin-English speakers. Half the children in each language group were 4-year-olds and half were 3-year-olds. For the monolingual English speakers, the 3year-olds had a mean age of 3;6 (range 3;23;11) and the 4-year-olds had a mean age of 4;6 (range 4;04;10). The monolingual Mandarin Chinese 3-year olds had a mean age of 3;6 (range 3;23;10) and the 4-year-olds a mean age of 4;6 (range 4;24;10). The Mandarin-English bilingual 3-year-olds had a mean age of 3;6 (range 3;23;11) and the bilingual 4-year-olds had a mean age of 4;6, (range 4;04;11). Ethnically, the monolingual English speakers were primarily European American (75% Caucasian, 22% African American, 3% Hispanic) and middle class, reecting the demographics of the area from which they were drawn. All children were involved in at least a part-time daycare program. Chinese-speaking children were recruited from a university daycare in Beijing, Peoples Republic of China. English-speaking children were recruited from daycare centers in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and bilingual children were recruited from daycare centers and Chinese schools in Ann Arbor, Michigan or in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. Since matching socioeconomic class across Chinese and American cultures is somewhat problematic, the groups were matched according to parental level of education so that every child tested had at least one college-educated parent. The bilingual children were found in daycares in the US that reported the childrens home language to be

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Peggy J. Goetz

Table 1. Mandarin and English monolinguals and Mandarin-English bilinguals mean PPVT standard scores and (standard deviations).
Language Chinese Form A 3-year-olds Monolinguals Bilinguals 4-year-olds Monolinguals Bilinguals Form B Form A English Form B

96.6 (11.4) 96.0 (12.7) 101.3 (10.0) 86.8 (14.9)

103.9 (16.4) 90.0 (15.0) 110.1 (12.1) 109.0 (8.4)

108.1 (10.8) 95.1 (15.2) 112.6 (11.2) 96.0 (13.1)

110.8 (9.9) 90.7 (14.9) 109.8 (11.1) 105.2 (11.2)

Mandarin. Four other bilingual children were tested who were not used in the study because their PPVT (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) scores were below the lowest score obtained by a monolingual child (a standard score of 64). The means and standard deviations of the standard scores of the bilinguals and monolinguals on the PPVT Form A and Form B are shown in Table 1. Note that the bilingual children who were given Form A in Mandarin were given Form B in English (and vice versa) so that there are two different groups of bilingual children being represented in the scores of each age group. Thus, the scores of the same bilingual children at time 1 and time 2 are not placed next to each other as are those of the Chinese- and English-speaking monolingual groups (for example, the group of 3-year-old bilingual children who averaged a 96 on their PPVT Form A in Chinese are the same group that averaged 90.7 when taking the PPVT Form B in English). None of the monolingual English-speaking children were reported to have any language other than English in their home environment. One of the monolingual Mandarin-speaking children had a grandfather who spoke Cantonese, a language the child did not understand, in addition to Mandarin. For all of the bilingual children, Mandarin was the primary language in the home environment, and their rst experience in English immersion came from their participation in daycare centers, which they had entered between the ages of 2 and 2;6. All the children, however, had some level of English input in their home environment as well, either from conversations with their parents or friends, reading books, watching television, or playing on the computer. The bilingual children usually had two ethnically Chinese parents with the exception of four children who each had a Chinese mother and a non-Chinese father. About half of the children had parents who came from the Peoples Republic of China, and the other half had parents from Taiwan. Mandarin is the primary language of both

countries though there are small dialectal differences which could be said to be on the order of those that exist between American and British English. In addition, of the 40 bilingual children, 12 were also exposed to Taiwanese (not a dialect of Mandarin) or other dialects of Chinese (Cantonese, Toisanese, and Shanghaiese) to greater or lesser degrees; sometimes these third languages were only rarely spoken by a parent or other relative and sometimes they were the languages the parents used to communicate to each other when they did not want their child to understand them. Procedure All children were tested individually in a small room by a native speaker of the language used. Bilingual children were tested rst in one language and then a week later in the other one; half the bilingual children were tested rst in Mandarin and the other half were tested rst in English. The monolinguals were tested twice, a week apart, in their own language each time. All children were given Form A of all the tests at the rst testing session and Form B the second week. Each testing session lasted approximately 30 minutes. The tests each child was given are described in detail below. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test was always given rst, and the remaining tests were given in a randomized order. General language ability test In order to be certain that the bilingual children had abilities in their two languages that were fairly balanced and somewhat comparable to those of the monolinguals, the general language ability of all the children was measured by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test Third Edition (Dunn, Dunn and Dunn, 1997). All children were given Form A at the rst session and Form B at the second session. The test words were translated into Mandarin Chinese by a native Mandarin speaker

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Bilingualism and theory of mind development and reviewed by two other native Mandarin speakers for accuracy. This translated version of the PPVT, unlike the English task, has not been standardized so clearly this translation cannot be used diagnostically in the same way as the English PPVT. For the purposes of this study, however, a rough assessment of the childrens Mandarin ability can be obtained to insure that the bilingual children were fairly procient and balanced in their two languages. Bilingual children who scored below 64 on one of their Standardized Scores (the lowest score of a monolingual child) were dropped from the study. Appearance-reality tasks All children were given an appearance-reality test (Flavell et al., 1983; Flavell, Zhang, Zou, Dong and Qi, 1983) in two forms. Form A used a pen which appeared to be a small sh as a stimulus object, and Form B used an imitation rock resembling a piece of granite made out of sponge-like material. For both forms, there was a pretraining exercise to familiarize the children with the concepts of appearance and reality, followed by the appearance-reality test consisting of two questions. The appearance and the reality test questions were counterbalanced, as was the ordering of the alternative answers. Children were shown the object in its deceptive form rst and asked, Whats this? The true nature of the object was then revealed to the children by the experimenter allowing them to write with the sh-pen or squeeze-therock-sponge. The children were again asked, What is it? and prompted with the real label (pen or sponge) if they hesitated. The children were then asked the appearance test question, What does this look like? Does it look like a sh or like a pen? and the reality test question, What is this really? Is it really a sh or really a pen? Children were scored as passing this task only if they answered both questions correctly. Level 2 perspective-taking tasks All children were given a level 2 perspective-taking task (Flavell, Everett, Croft and Flavell, 1981) in two forms. Form A used a picture of a turtle, and Form B used a picture of an elephant. Both Forms were preceded by a pretraining exercise to familiarize the children with the terms standing on its feet and lying on its back in regard to the animals pictured. For the test, the direction the picture faced initially was counterbalanced as were the two alternative answers. The picture of the turtle was placed horizontally on the table between the child and the experimenter. The child was then asked the two test questions, When you look at the turtle right now, does it look like its standing on its feet or lying on its back? and When I look at the turtle right now, does it look like its standing on its feet or lying on its back? The picture was then turned around

180 degrees, and the questions were repeated. Children were scored as passing this task only if they answered both questions correctly for each direction. False belief tasks (unexpected contents) All children were given two forms of an unexpected contents false belief task (Hogrefe et al.,1986). Form A used an M&Ms box containing a toy car, and Form B used a crayon or pencil box containing a small chocolate bar. The ordering of the two alternative answers was counterbalanced. Children were shown a box of M&Ms and asked the initial question, What do you think is in the box? After the children answered, the box was opened to reveal the car. The object was then replaced in the box and the lid closed before the experimenter asked the test question, Your friend hasnt seen inside this box. What will he/she say is inside before he/she opens it? Will he/she say there is candy or a car inside? The false belief test question was asked using the verb say (What did you SAY was in the box?) rather than the mental verb think for the following reason. Lee et al. (1999) found Mandarin-speaking children performance signicantly better on false belief tests which used mental verbs with false-belief connotations (yi3wei2 and dang4) in comparison with those that used the more neutral verb xiang3. To avoid these connotations in Mandarin, my false-belief test questions used only nonmental verbs (look for and say) so that no signicant differences were expected to be found between the monolingual English and monolingual Chinese speakers. Hogrefe et al. (1986) previously used the German verb say in their version of these test questions because of similar difculties, and Gopnik and Slaughters (1991) study and Wellman, Cross and Watsons (2001) meta-analysis found that using the verbs think or say for these test questions produced no signicant difference in the performance of children on false belief tasks. Children were scored as passing this test if they answered the test question correctly. False belief task (unexpected transfer) All children were given two forms of the false belief task (unexpected transfer) as rst described by Wimmer and Perner (1983). Form A used two small gures, John and his mother, and two small toy drawers of different colors to act out a story. Form B told essentially the same story with small dolls, Lily and her older sister, and two different-colored pails. The experimenter told the following story, This is John and this is Johns house where there is a red drawer and a blue drawer. Today is Johns birthday and Johns friends have given him a piece of candy. John doesnt want to lose the candy so he goes home to put it away. John decides to put the candy in the blue drawer, and then he goes back outside to play

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Peggy J. Goetz Table 2. Mandarin Chinese and English monolinguals mean TOM scores and standard deviations (range 04).
Chinese monolinguals TOM1 TOM2 English monolinguals TOM1 TOM2

with his friends. When hes outside, he cant see whats happening in his house, right? Now Johns mother comes home from work. She decides to clean the house, and she says, I need to clean this blue drawer. She opens the drawer and says, Theres candy in the blue drawer. Im going to put it in the red drawer. So she puts the candy in the red drawer, and then she decides to go shopping. After a little while, John comes home, and hes hungry and wants to eat the chocolate. The experimenter then asked the children the test question, Where will John look rst for the chocolate? Will he look in the red drawer or the blue drawer? The color drawer chosen initially and the alternative answers of the prompt question were counterbalanced. Questionnaire Parents of all bilingual children were given a short questionnaire to provide more background information about the childs language environment. Parents were asked about what language(s) the child heard in the home from parents, other relatives, or friends. They were also asked about what type of English input the child had in the home environment. Results The results are organized into 1) a comparison between the two groups of monolingual speakers and 2) a comparison between the group of bilingual speakers and the two monolingual groups. Monolingual Chinese and monolingual English comparison TOM score All children were given two TOM (theory of mind) scores (with a range of 04), which consisted of a combination of their pass/fail scores on the four theory of mindrelated tasks (appearance-reality, level 2 perspectivetaking, false belief unexpected contents, and false belief unexpected transfer). The rst score, TOM1, represents their performance at the rst testing session on the Form A of all the tests; the second score, TOM2, represents the second testing session with Form B. A comparison of the means and standard deviations of the Chinese and English monolinguals combined scores on the theory of mind-related tasks is shown in Table 2. A 2(age) by 2(language) by 2(time/form) repeatedmeasures ANOVA was performed with age and language as between-subjects factors and time/form as a withinsubjects factor. A main effect for age was found, with 4-year-olds doing signicantly better than 3-year-olds, F(1, 60) = 38.46, p < .001. There was also a signicant difference between the childrens performance at the rst testing time/form (TOM1) and the second testing

3-year-olds 0.88 (.81) 1.06 (.85) 4-year-olds 2.25 (.93) 3.0 (.82)

1.13 (1.03) 1.44 (1.03) 2.38 (1.41) 2.69 (1.14)

time/form (TOM2), F(1,60) = 15.29, p < .001, with the children performing better at the second testing. There was no overall effect of language on the childrens performance on these tasks and no signicant interactions. In addition, a 2(age) by 2(language) ANCOVA was performed for each testing time/form with age and language as between-subjects factors and PPVT standard scores as the covariate. There was a signicant association between the PPVTA score and the TOM1 score at the rst testing time, F(1,60) = 6.25, p = .015, but at the second testing time, the correlation had only a near signicant tendency, F(1,60) = 3.68, p = .06. After adjusting for PPVT, a main effect for age was found at both testing times, with 4-year-olds doing signicantly better than 3-year-olds, at time1/Form A, F(1, 60) = 20.09, p < .001 and at time 2/Form B F(1, 60) = 42.06, p < .001. There was no overall effect of language on the childrens performance on these tasks and no signicant interactions.

Individual theory of mind-related tasks The results for the individual theory of mind-related tasks were analyzed to determine if test performance on any particular task was inuenced by language. Each monolingual child was also given a total score (02) for their performance on each individual task across the two testing times for the appearance-reality, perspective taking, and the two false belief tasks (unexpected contents and unexpected transfer); these scores are abbreviated as AR, PT, FBc, and FBt. The means and standard deviations for the four individual theory of mind-related tasks combined over the two testing sessions are presented in Table 3 for both groups of monolinguals. A 2(age group) by 2(language) general factorial analysis of variance was performed for each individual theory of mind-related task with age and language as xed factors and the individual task scores (ranging from 02) as the dependent factor. A main effect of age group was found for each of the individual tasks with 4-year-olds performing signicantly better than 3-year-olds for each task; for AR, F(1, 60) =5.12, p < .05; for PT, F(1,60) = 7.13, p = .01; for FBc, F(1,60) = 18.44, p < .001; for FBt, F(1,60) = 31.64, p < .001. There was no effect for language and no signicant interaction in any of the individual tasks.

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Bilingualism and theory of mind development Table 3. Mandarin Chinese and English monolinguals mean scores and standard deviations on the individual TOM tasks combined over the two testing sessions (range 02).
Combined score over both forms/testing sessions Chinese monolinguals Appearance-reality 3-year-olds 4-year-olds Perspective-taking 3-year-olds 4-year-olds False-belief (contents) 3-year-olds 4-year-olds False-belief (transfer) 3-year-olds 4-year-olds English monolinguals

.88 (.81) 1.5 (.73) .63 (.81) 1.31 (.87) .25 (.58) 1.0 (.89) .19 (.40) 1.44 (.81)

1.0 (.97) 1.31 (.79) .81 (.75) 1.25 (.93) .19 (.40) 1.06 (.99) .56 (.81) 1.44 (.89)

In summary, none of these tests showed a language difference between the English and Mandarin monolinguals, and all tests showed 4-year-olds doing signicantly better than 3-year-olds on all of the tasks. These age differences were least signicant for the appearance-reality tasks, and greatest for the false-belief tasks.

Bilingual and monolingual comparisons TOM score The childrens theory of mind (TOM) score came from their performance on the four tasks, as previously described, for a total possible score of 4 for each testing time/form (TOM1 and TOM2). The means and standard deviations of these TOM scores for the bilingual and monolingual groups are shown in Table 4. Note that the bilinguals who were given Form A in Mandarin were given Form B in English (and vice versa) so that there are two different groups of bilingual children being represented in the scores of each age group. Thus, unlike the two sets of scores for the Chinese- and English-speaking monolingual groups, the scores of the same group of bilingual children at time 1 and time 2 are not in adjacent columns. A 2(age) by 2(mono-bilingual) by 2(time/form) repeated-measures ANOVA was performed with age and mono-bilingualism as between-subjects factors and time/form as a within-subjects factor. A main effect for age and mono-bilingualism was found, with 4-year-olds

doing signicantly better than 3-year-olds, F(1, 100) = 57.238, p < .001 and bilinguals doing signicantly better than monolinguals, F(1,100) = 6.08, p < .025. There was also a signicant difference between the childrens performance at the rst testing time/form (TOM1) and the second testing time/form (TOM2), F(1,100) = 6.66, p < .025, with the children performing better at the second testing. There were no signicant interactions. A 2(age) by 2(language given rst) by 2(monobilingual) ANCOVA was performed for each testing time/form with age and mono-bilingualism as betweensubjects factors and PPVT standard scores as the covariate. There was a signicant association between the PPVTA score and the TOMA score at time 1, F(1,100) = 17.54, p < .001, but at time 2, the correlation was not signicant. After adjusting for PPVT, a main effect for age was found at both testing times, with 4-year-olds doing signicantly better than 3-year-olds, at time 1/Form A, F(1, 100) = 42.82, p < .001 and at time 2/Form B, F(1, 100) = 40.71, p < .001. There was a main effect for mono-bilingualism at time 1/Form A, with bilinguals performing signicantly better than monolinguals, F(1,100) = 21.74, p < .001, and there was a near signicant tendency for bilinguals to perform better than monolinguals at time 2/Form B, F(1,100) = 3.7, p = .057. There was no overall effect of language given rst on the childrens performance on these tasks and no signicant interactions. Two additional comparisons were made on only the bilingual childrens scores. A 2(age) by 2(language given rst) by 2(TOM score in English/Chinese) repeatedmeasures ANOVA was performed with age and language given rst as between-subjects factors and the TOM score in English or Chinese (regardless of time/form) as a within-subjects factor. A main effect for age was found, with 4-year-olds doing signicantly better than 3-yearolds, F(1, 36) = 24.6, p < .001. Language given rst and the comparison between their TOM scores in English and Chinese were not signicant, and there were no signicant interactions. To test for a time/form effect, two paired t-tests were performed on the time/form difference between the bilingual children, who were separated into two groups according to the language they received rst. No signicant difference was found between their TOM score at time 1/Form A and their TOM score at time 2/Form B for either of the groups of bilingual children. Individual theory of mind-related tasks The results for the individual theory of mind-related tasks were analyzed to determine if test performance on any particular task was inuenced by mono-bilingualism. The pass/fail counts (and percentages) of monolingual and bilingual children who passed the four individual theory of mind-related tasks (appearance-reality, level 2 perspective-taking, unexpected contents false belief, and

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Peggy J. Goetz

Table 4. Mandarin and English monolinguals and Mandarin-English bilinguals mean TOM scores and standard deviations (range 04).
Chinese TOM1 3-year-olds Monolinguals Bilinguals 4-year-olds Monolinguals Bilinguals TOM2 TOM1 English TOM2

.88 (.81) 1.60 (1.08) 2.25 (.93) 2.90 (.99)

1.06 (.85) 1.50 (1.18) 3.00 (.82) 3.40 (.70)

1.13 (1.02) 1.90 (.74) 2.38 (1.41) 3.00 (.82)

1.44 (1.03) 1.70 (1.16) 2.69 (1.14) 2.90 (1.29)

Table 5. Number (and percentage) of Mandarin and English monolinguals and bilinguals passing the four individual theory of mind-related tasks.
Chinese monolinguals T/F 1 n (%) Appearance-reality 3-year-olds 4-year-olds Perspective-taking 3-year-olds 4-year-olds False-belief (contents) 3-year-olds 4-year-olds False-belief (transfer) 3-year-olds 4-year-olds T/F 2 n (%) English monolinguals T/F 1 n (%) T/F 2 n (%) T/F 1 n (%) Bilinguals T/F 2 n (%)

7 (44) 10 (63) 3 (19) 9 (56) 3 (19) 7 (44) 1 (6) 10 (63)

7 (44) 14 (88) 7 (44) 12 (75) 1 (6) 9 (56) 2 (13) 13 (81)

8 (50) 10 (63) 5 (31) 9 (56) 2 (13) 8 (50) 3 (19) 11 (69)

8 (50) 11 (69) 8 (50) 11 (69) 1 (6) 9 (56) 6 (38) 12 (75)

14 (70) 18 (90) 11 (55) 14 (70) 6 (30) 11 (55) 4 (20) 16 (80)

10 (50) 19 (95) 10 (50) 16 (80) 7 (35) 14 (70) 5 (25) 14 (70)

unexpected transfer false belief) are presented in Table 5 for both time 1/Form A and time 2/Form B. For this analysis, the pass/fail scores of these individual tasks were not combined across the two testing trials but were analyzed for each time/form separately; these scores are abbreviated as AR1, AR2, PT1, PT2, FBc1, FBc2, FBt1, and FBt2. As a result of the signicant time/form difference for the monolinguals but not for the bilinguals, these two times/forms were not combined for a total AR, PT, FBc or FBt score, but a logistic regression was run on the pass/fail counts with the individual task scores at time/form A or time/form B as the dependent variable and the age group and three language groups (English, Chinese, and bilingual) as the explanatory variables. For all tasks, there was a signicant effect of age (for AR1, p < .05; for AR2, p < .001; for PT1, p = .01; for PT2,

p = .01; for FBc1, p < .005; for FBc2, p < .001; for FBt1, p < .001; and for FBt2, p < .001). In all cases, 4-yearolds were performing better than 3-year-olds. There was a signicant difference of language in only three of the tasks for only one of the two testing sessions. For the appearance-reality task at time/form 1, the bilinguals performed better than the Chinese monolinguals (p < .05) and had a near-signicant tendency to perform better than the English monolinguals (p = .053); for the perspectivetaking task at time/form 1, the bilinguals performed signicantly better than only the Chinese monolinguals (p < .05); and for the false-belief unexpected contents task at time/form 2, the bilinguals performed signicantly better than both the English monolinguals (p < .05) and the Chinese monolinguals (p < .05). In summary, 4-year-olds performed signicantly better than 3-year-olds in all comparisons. Bilingual children

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Bilingualism and theory of mind development performed signicantly better than monolingual children on their overall TOM performance; however, when the two testing times/forms were examined separately with PPVT as a covariate, the bilinguals had signicantly higher TOM scores at time 1, but there was only a non-signicant tendency for bilinguals to perform better than monolinguals on their TOM scores at time 2. There was a signicant association between the PPVT score at time 1/Form A but not at time 2/Form B. For bilinguals, there was no signicant difference as a result of which language they were given rst, and no signicant difference between their performance at testing time/form 1 and 2. For the monolingual and bilingual comparison of the individual theory of mind-related tasks, bilinguals performed signicantly better than both monolingual groups in the false-belief unexpected contents task at time 2/Form B; bilinguals performed better than only the Chinese monolinguals in the appearance-reality task at time 1/Form A and in the perspective-taking task at time 1/ Form A. Discussion This study focused on two different ways in which language use may inuence the development of theory of mind in young children. The rst comparison was between English-speaking and Mandarin-speaking monolinguals, whose languages have interesting differences in their sets of mental verbs. The second comparison was between these same monolinguals and bilingual Mandarin- and English-speaking children for the purpose of examining whether bilinguals analysis of linguistic knowledge or their sociolinguistic awareness could inuence their developing theory of mind. Monolingual Chinese and monolingual English comparisons English and Mandarin monolinguals performances on all of the theory of mind tasks were essentially the same. Thus, despite the linguistic differences in mental verbs and the many cultural differences, English- and Mandarinspeaking children perform remarkably similarly, and their patterns of theory of mind development from 3- to 4-years of age follow the same pattern that has typically been found with these tasks. Thus, in terms of the somewhat contradictory results of Chen and Lin (1994) and Lee et al. (1999), the results of this study contradict the claims of Chen and Lin that Mandarin-speaking children perform more poorly than is usually the case with 3- and 4-yearolds. It seems likely that Chen and Lins lower-thanexpected ndings result primarily from the fact that Chen and Lins group of 3-year-olds included children aged 2;6 to 3;6, and their 4-year-olds ranged from 3;6 to 4;6. In addition, the stories used by Chen and Lin were slightly

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more complicated than the standard unexpected transfer stories. Chen and Lins study also had no comparison group which might have claried the question of whether the reported poor Chinese performance actually resulted from their more complicated stories or their atypical age ranges. In regard to the other study of Mandarin-speaking children (Lee et al., 1999), these results ll in an important gap concerning the question of whether having a linguistic system which contains verbs with false-belief connotations inuences childrens false-belief performance even when these verbs are not explicitly used. Lee et al. showed that Chinese childrens false belief performance improved with these false-belief verbs, but they made no direct comparison to English-speaking children. This study shows that the information gained from the false-belief verb does not aid the children in general when no mental verb is used, and the children are only required to predict anothers action. Thus, the ndings parallel the results of Shatz et al. (1995), who found that the existence of a false belief form in a language helps when that form is actually used but does not facilitate false belief performance when neutral verbs are used. Monolingual and bilingual comparisons In general, the monolingualbilingual comparisons reveal a bilingual advantage; overall, bilinguals perform signicantly better than monolinguals on the theory of mind-related tasks. When the two testing times/forms are examined separately, however, their advantage is only signicant in the rst testing time with the Form A tests. At time 2/Form B, there is only a non-signicant tendency for the bilinguals to perform better, and this difference is primarily because the monolingual children improve signicantly between the rst and second testing times/forms, while the bilingual children scores at time 1/Form A and time 2/Form B are not signicantly different. The monolingualbilingual comparisons on the individual theory of mind-related tasks also show mixed results. In a comparison of only the appearance-reality, level 2 perspective-taking, and false-belief unexpected contents tasks, the percentage of bilingual children passing is always higher than the percentage of monolinguals, but this is only signicant in comparison with both monolingual groups in the false-belief unexpected contents task; for the appearance-reality and level 2 perspective-taking task, the bilinguals are only signicantly better than the Chinese monolinguals, and all these comparisons are only signicant for one of the two testing times. The false-belief unexpected transfer task, in somewhat of a contrast, shows no bilingual advantage and is the only individual task in which the bilingual percentages are actually lower than the monolinguals.

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Peggy J. Goetz types of bilinguals. The fact that these children were always tested in the presence of both a Chinese experimenter and an experimenter whose native language was English (although both experimenters always spoke in the language of the testing session) may have made their language choices especially salient to them, and this situation may have increased their attention toward controlling their responses. The nal explanation relates to bilingual childrens growing sociolinguistic awareness of the need to match their language to that of their partners, their developing understanding that their partners knowledge of language can be different from their own, and their recognition that they must take this difference into account for successful communication. The bilingual children used in this study may have been particularly likely to have experienced the need for this awareness since these children were placed into a bilingual environment only after they were about two years old and had already begun acquiring their rst language system. The presence of the two differentlanguage experimenters may also have primed them for the need to pay attention to their language choice and the language of their partners; some of the children seemed quite visibly shocked to hear a non-Asian speak Chinese. This type of sociolinguistic effect is somewhat related to other social-experiential studies of theory of mind acquisition, such as Ruffman et al.s (1998) ndings that having older siblings improves childrens theory of mind performance; older siblings give children more chances to argue, be teased and tricked, and thus the differing beliefs of others are made more salient. This experiential kind of mechanism would be similar to what might be happening with the bilingual children; their increased experience with people whose linguistic knowledge differs from their own makes others mental states more salient. Certainly all these aspects of a bilingual childs development could be at work, and it will only be future experiments which could more clearly differentiate these explanations or distribute the degree of advantage among them. In addition to this discussion of the possible explanations for a bilingual advantage, it must be admitted that because no cognitive assessment was made of the children, the differences between the monolingual and bilingual groups could be a result of cognitive differences between the groups rather than their monolingual bilingual differences. Future studies will need to use both tests of language ability and cognitive assessment to rule out this possibility. For both the monolinguals and the bilinguals, a correlation was found between the PPVT test scores and the TOM scores at time 1/Form A, but for the monolingual groups the correlation had only a near-signicant tendency at time 1/Form B, and for the bilinguals there was no correlation at all at the second testing time. These results are interesting in light of previous ndings

Altogether there is certainly some evidence for a bilingual advantage on the theory of mind-related tasks. What are some possible candidates for an explanation of this advantage? Three possibilities relate to factors that have previously been mentioned: a metalinguisitic advantage which may aid in developing representational abilities, greater linguistic control over conicting representations which may produce a greater inhibitory control, and greater sociolinguistic awareness of the need to note their conversational partners linguistic knowledge; there is some evidence for all three possibilities. It is possible that bilinguals have greater metalinguistic abilities which they may have acquired through deeper linguistic analysis or from the recognition that one object can be represented in two ways linguistically. Since bilingual children are frequently presented with objects that can be represented in two ways linguistically, they may more easily recognize the arbitrariness of language. This kind of metalinguistic awareness may have given the bilinguals a way into an understanding of metarepresentation, that one object can be represented differently by different people, and so have accounted for the bilinguals better performance on the theory of mindrelated tasks. Another option is that bilinguals executive function operation is more advanced; the area of inhibitory control is one which has recently been shown to be related to false-belief performance (Carlson, Moses and Hix, 1998; Carlson and Moses, 2001). This possibility ts in well with Bialystoks (1988, 1992, 1999) suggestion that bilinguals need a higher level of control over their selective attention so that they can resist the natural pull toward perceptual salience in situations of ambiguity or conicting representations. Though clearly further tests would have to be done to make this connection, one aspect of the results in this study makes this option worth future study, the bilinguals better performance on only the appearance-reality, perspective taking, and false-belief unexpected contents but not the false-belief unexpected transfer task. One difference between the two tests as they were given in this study was that in order to answer the false-belief unexpected contents questions, children needed to respond verbally, but to answer the false-belief unexpected transfer questions, children only needed to point to the drawer of their choice, and, in fact, all children did point to answer this question though some included a verbal comment, such as there or that one. Perhaps the proposed increased inhibitory control of bilinguals is particularly linked to the linguistic realm and thus only aided the bilinguals in the rst false-belief task in which they had to answer verbally. This suggestion is only a possibility as of now, but it would be worth further testing bilingual childrens inhibitory control for different types of responses, and it would also be useful to test different

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Bilingualism and theory of mind development (Jenkins and Astington, 1996, using the Test of Early Language Development; Taylor and Carlson, 1997, using the PPVT), which have shown a connection between general language ability and theory of mind performance and other research (Welch-Ross, 1997, using mean length of utterance), which has found no relation. The results here give partial support to the ndings of Taylor and Carlson (1997); they also show the bilingual advantage to be signicant at the rst testing time/form even after adjusting for the childrens PPVT performance. There is no obvious reason why the association would not be found the second testing time, since the two PPVT test forms are meant to be equivalent, but it is possible that the Mandarin Chinese translated versions of the test are not as equivalent to one another as the standardized English forms. Another question about the second testing time/form relates to nding that the bilingual advantage was not seen to be as signicant for the second testing/form. Particularly intriguing was the fact that the monolinguals performance on the theory of mind-related tasks signicantly improved from the rst to the second testing time, while the bilinguals did not, a difference which may largely account for the bilinguals superior performance at time 1 and not time 2. The possibility that the monolinguals all did better the second time because of the differences in the second set of test forms cannot be completely ruled out since these forms were not counterbalanced; however, the only test form which changed in any signicant way from Form A to Form B was the appearance-reality test, which used a pen that looked like a sh at time 1 and a sponge that looked like a rock at time 2. Although both of these items have an appearance and a reality, it is possible that the sponge/rock distinction might have been more salient for the children than the sh/pen because the former was a more successfully deceptive object. For the other three sets of test, the differences between the Form A and Form B seem completely insignicant; there is no clear reason that a different set of dolls would be more helpful to monolinguals than to bilinguals. One explanation for the time difference between the two groups is that the bilingual advantage had already improved the bilinguals performance to its optimal level at the rst testing time, and thus at the second testing time, they did not have much room to improve while the monolinguals did. Alternatively, another possibility is that the effect of being tested in one language twice gave some kind of advantage which was not given to bilinguals when they were tested once in one of their languages and the second time in their other language. Perhaps these bilinguals in particular, who have probably had to clearly delineate their home language from their daycare language, are less likely to be able to use the information gained from the tests in one language

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when they are confronted with them in a second language, especially if these retest changes are resulting from the beginning of an understanding for those children who have only a fragile concept of theory of mind. As has been mentioned in other contexts, testing other bilinguals who might have less separated senses of their language would be a useful contrast. This seeming lack of transfer might also be very age-specic to younger children who are in the process of acquiring their two languages and who may be most deeply in need of emphasizing the differences between them, a characteristic that Bialystok (1998, 1992) mentions as another likely important ability in the bilinguals repertoire. Little research has been done to see how young bilinguals use of their two languages interacts with conceptual changes. For these type of bilinguals (home and daycare language split), and at this age in particular, the development of their two languages in relation to one another may be changing as their language uency increases. These ndings suggest further possibilities of research for making connections between theory of mind acquisition and conceptual change in representational understanding or information-processing abilities. In addition, they point to issues relating to the importance of sociolinguistic understanding and to the ways in which young bilinguals deal with their two languages. References
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