Deficiencia auditiva y teoría de la mente. Datos para la reflexión y la intervención

In the past twelve years a considerable amount of research has been carried out on the development of theory of mind (ToM) in deaf children, reporting that deaf children with hearing parents present a serious delay in the understanding of false belief. In this article, findings from a Spanish study evaluating the relation between age, language and understanding of first and second-order false belief for late-signing deaf participants are shown. The sample consisted of 54 deaf participants (aged 6 to 19 years) from hearing families. All the participants present prespeech deafness (severe or deep) having no associated deficiencies. The results show an important delay in ToM in relation with typical development, since only from 11 years old onwards is there a high percentage of success in the resolution of false belief tasks. The understanding of second-order false belief is more frequent in 14 years old onwards participants. Besides age, the level of oral lexical competence is a variable able to explain the differences in ToM performance among deaf participants. In Discussion all these data are discussed and some rudiments for intervention on ToM with deaf children are given to professionals and families.