The relationship of aspects of language and development of theory of mind in children

The different studies in normal children and those with developmental language disorders showed the relationship between language and development of theory of mind (ToM). But, there is not agreement between authors about role of language aspects (lexicon, semantic, syntax, and pragmatics) in development of theory of mind. The aim of this review article was the study of relationship of aspects of language and development of theory of mind in normal children and those with developmental language disorder. This study was a narrative review. The Persian and English published articles during 1995 to 2012 were searched from different websites [Cochreane library, Proquest, Springer, Ebsco, Sciencedirect, PubMed, Magiran and Scientific Information Database (SID)]. Keywords included theory of mind, language, syntax, syntactic complement, semantic, lexicon and pragmatics. Then, the titles and abstracts of the related articles about relationship between language and theory of mind were selected and studied. The language is the most important factor and predictor of theory-of-mind development. Although, lexicon, semantics, pragmatics and general language were important in development of theory of mind, but most of the articles had stressed the role of syntactic complements (sentences with mental or communicative verbs) in its development in normal children and children with developmental language disorders. As syntactic complements are necessary prerequisites for development of theory of mind, particularly for false belief concept, it is predicted that focus on training these aspects in children with developmental language disorders can influence on both theory of mind development and language complexity.