What’s this guy thinking? Does he know what I know? Most of us develop the ability to make inferences about what other people might be thinking, the hallmark of “theory of mind,” at age four. Scientists have long known that the acquisition of language plays a role in this process, but so far it had been unclear whether social experience could substitute for it. A new study suggests it cannot.
Jennie Pyers of Wellesley College and her colleagues studied deaf adults in Nicaragua. Some of the participants had learned an early, rudimentary form of Nicaraguan sign language (NSL), whereas others were fluent in a more sophisticated form of NSL that included mental state terms, such as “know” and “think.” Pyers and her team had all signers undergo a so-called false-belief test in which signers looked at a sequence of pictures showing two boys playing in a room and storing a toy underneath a bed. After one of the boys leaves the room, the other moves the toy to a different location. Study participants then had to choose between two pictures to complete the series: the first showed the returning boy looking for the toy in its original location on reentering the room, and the second showed him looking in its new location.
Those Nicaraguans with complex sign language skills were more likely to choose the first picture—indicating an understanding of false belief—than were those with less developed language skills. Moreover, after a two-year period during which early signers improved their NSL knowledge, they performed better at the false-belief task.
The findings support the hypothesis that although an implicit understanding of other people’s knowledge and belief states develops early in life, advanced language is needed “to unlock the ability to productively use it,” Pyers says.
Note: This story was originally published with the title "Reading Minds"
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4 Comments
Add CommentFunnily enough, this test was done before with chimps - so it's not a new idea at all! And language acquisition did not play a part in it , I presume.....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a linguist and language teacher, however, I have found that over three decades, my best foreign language students by far have always been the ones with the most social intelligence. Learning a new language - at any age!- makes us more human, because it re-enforces empathy - not only to the student, but also to the teacher!
Did it occur to anyone connected with this "test" that subjects with "less developed language skills" might not understand what sort of choice they were expected to make? The most likely response or the most accurate? Try explaining it to yourself with the "reduced instruction set" of something like a primitive form of sign language! Did the "rudimentary" sign language even include conditionals?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis would be junk science even if it hadn't been ridiculously over-interpreted and over-publicized here and elsewhere.
There is an widely held view, true or not, that Italian men are more emotionally intelligent than the rest of us men. I (an Englishman) am learning Italian and it recently dawned on me that the nature of the Italian language might explain this gulf.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisItalians seldom use subject pronouns (he, she, it etc.) and their object pronouns which they use with abandon can mean all manner of things ( la can mean her , it , or you ). An Italian may appear to be saying hes dumped her when in fact they are saying shes dumped you ! Native speakers seem to be able to handle all this ambiguity as it is fired at them, and semantically file it in their minds with ease. They have an empathetic (and to me, telepathic) notion of what is being said about whom and what is being done by whom to what. We dont have to think very hard because in English we are being fully informed at every stage in the story.
Italian men must surely, therefore, have an enhanced sense of belief states and semantics, in other words, greater emotional intelligence. Of course, this applies as much, or more, to Italian women but women everywhere score highly on emotional intelligence. By focusing on Italian men (who should in theory be somewhat lacking in the emotional intelligence stakes like the rest of us) it throws the point at issue into sharper relief.
I believe that from an early age they are forced by the very nature of their native tongue, to be sensitive to subtle emotional cues in speech such as intonation, timing, cadence and facial expression. This would be coupled with a developed understanding of the belief states of the people being referred to in conversation or the written word. This means that they would develop an ability to interpret every last nuance from the story and even have a rough and ready notion of what the motives and reactions of the protagonists might be, ready to compare with the next piece of information. This would all be happening almost subconsciously in real time.
If this is true then there must be a neurological potential that is present in all of us but only worked up to its fullest potential where the structure of the language demands it (rather like taxi drivers and their enlarged hippocampus region- a spatial language repository). Italian men are forced to use it and greater emotional intelligence might be a very welcome side effect- which would at least explain why doting, demonstrative, Italian men put the rest of us to shame!
This conjecture both agrees with and runs counter to the conclusion in the article because it would suggest that language does effect social intelligence but in the opposite way to the experiment- i.e. a reduced set of language tools is compensated for by developing intellectual strategies that are just as effective, if not richer in their powers of interpretation, than exact descriptions.
@Jacob Freeze
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAre you familiar with the exact methodology of the test? I tend to assume that researchers aren't necessarily idiots and have probably taken this into account as far as they are able.
I'm not advocating credulousness but it's important to recognise that generally if you can spot a flaw in something instantly from a few paragraph summary then it might have occurred to those who spend every day researching a particular topic for months and years on end.
Alternatively I'm sure the original researchers will be along presently to thank you for pointing out the previously unnoticed flaw in their methodology and their follow-up paper will be watertight. Thanks for contributing to science!