Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Verbal Scaffolding In Children's Theory Of Mind, Kathline C. Gomes

Scripps Senior Theses

For nearly 30 years, researchers have been proposing and testing theories of the cognitive mechanisms that underlie children’s abilities to comprehend the mental states of others and to predict behavior on the basis of those abilities. One such theory, the “theory theory,” contends that children evaluate their own understanding of others’ minds, developing a theory and expanding it when they encounter situations incongruent with their predictions. Wellman and Liu (2004) present a scale of the changes that children’s understanding of mental state representations commonly undergo as children develop a mature theory of mind. The present study aims to clarify how …