Entrenar la comprensión de la falsa creencia en niños con alteraciones del lenguaje

The capacity to attribute mental states to oneself and others, that is, theory of mind, has been intensely studied in the last few years. Most of the investigations in this field have focused on the study of false beliefs, a developmental milestone that normally developing children acquire around the age of 4 to 5 years. However, several authors have pointed out that children with language difficulties may show a delay in the acquisition of false belief understanding. On the other hand, this attainment has been related to linguistic abilities. Concretely, some training studies suggest that labeling objects with a double perspective fosters false-belief understanding. The aim of the present study was to apply this kind of training to children with language development difficulties. We studied 14 children with language difficulties aged between 58 and 107 months. The participants were administered a pretest and a posttest to evaluate the effects of the training. Consistently with the results of prior studies, our results showed a delay in children's false-belief understanding, suggesting, however, that training based on labeling objects with a double perspective facilitated their acquisition of this ability.