Deaf Children's Understanding of Beliefs and Desires
Lucy Steeds
University of Oxford
Karen Rowe
University of Bristol
Ann Dowker
University of Oxford
Twenty-two children (5-12 years old) who were profoundly,
prelingually deaf were given two tests designed to tap their
"theory of mind," that is, their ability to attribute independent mental states to other people. The tests were versions
of Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith's Sally-Anne task and of
Baron-Cohen's breakfast task. Seventy percent of the children were successful on all questions requiring belief attribution, a considerably and significantly larger percentage than
the 29% obtained by Peterson and Siegal for a similar sample, though it is still lower than would be expected on the
basis on chronological age. Children were universally successful on questions requiring the attribution of desire. We
discuss implications of the findings.
A child credited with having a "theory of mind" is able
to attribute independent mental states to himself or
herself and others in order to predict and explain behavior (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). Despite the somewhat misleading term, this child need only take account of another person's beliefs, desires, and thoughts;
it is not assumed that he or she conceives of these mental states as unobservable entities. In other words, a
child with a theory of mind need not have postulated
any theoretical constructs (quasi-scientifically). For
convenience, the term theory of mind will be used in
this article as it has frequently been used in the literaWe think the staff and pupils at Elmfidd School in Bristol and the Frank
Barnes School in London; Dr. J. G. Kyle «t the Centre for Deaf Studies,
University of Bristol; Dr. R. W. Hiorns for his advice on statistics; and
Prof. R. Campbell and Dr. P. L. Harris for helpful discussion. Prof. C
Peterson and two anonymous reviewers provided useful feedback on earlier drafts. Correspondence should be sent to Ann Dowker, Department
of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road,
Oxford OX1 3UD, England.
Copyright © 1997 Oxford Univertity Press. CCC 1081-4159
ture: to refer to children's ability to explicitly take account of other people's mental states in a test situation.
No assumptions are made either about the presence or
absence of theoretical constructs, or about the extent
to which children's performance on such tasks may result in underestimates (Chandler, Fritz, & Hala, 1989;
Clements & Perner, 1994) or overestimates (Clark,
1990; Murray & Field, 1990; Happe, 1995) of their implicit understanding of mental states in a more naturalistic context.
Experiments testing for theory of mind have aimed
to tap children's understanding of several different
mental states and have taken a variety of forms. The
first such experiment (Wimmer & Perner, 1983) and
many subsequently (e.g., Baron-Cohen, Leslie, &
Frith, 1985; Perner, Ruffman, & Leekam, 1994) have
focused on whether young children can predict another
person's behavior as based on his or her mistaken belief.
There is some agreement that success in these so-called
false-belief tasks typically emerges in normal children
when they are around 4 years old.
Growing evidence now shows that many autistic
children have difficulties with tasks that assess theory
of mind (e.g., Baron-Cohen et al., 1985), and attempts
have been made to account for the full range of autistic
deficits in terms of a theory-of-mind impairment (e.g.,
Leslie, 1987, 1994; Baron-Cohen, 1993). This has led
to proposals of a theory-of-mind module that is impaired or absent in autism. A difficulty for such theories is that diagnostic criteria for autism include the development of symptoms before the age of 3 (DSM-IV):
186 Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 2:3 Summer 1997
that is, autistic children are already showing the disorder at an age when normal children also do not pass
false-belief tasks. Attempts to reconcile the conflicting
evidence range from suggestions that theory of mind
depends on a specific brain mechanism that is present
from birth but must mature before theory of mind can
be manifested (cf. Fletcher, Happe, Frith, Baker, Dolan, Frackowiack, & Frith, 1995) to proposals that
false-belief understanding develops out of other capacities that develop earlier, for example, pretend play
(Leslie, 1987) and shared attention (Baron-Cohen,
1991b, 1993, 1994; Baron-Cohen, Cox, Baird, Sweetenham, Nightingale, Morgan, Drew, & Charman,
1996). An alternative or complementary theory is that
the rate and extent of development of theory of mind
may be influenced by exposure to conversations about
mental states (cf. Perner, Ruffman, & Leekam, 1994;
Jenkins & Astington, 1996) and that the severe communication disorder of autistic children prevents them
from making adequate use of such conversations. Some
support for the latter theory comes from findings of associations between verbal ability and theory of mind
acquisition in both normal children (Happe, 1995; Jenkins & Astington, 1996) and autistic children (Happe,
1995; Sparrevohn & Howie, 1995), though a much
higher verbal mental age was necessary for theory of
mind tasks to be passed by autistic than normal children. Also, causal primacy has not been established.
If exposure to communication is important to the
development of a theory of mind, then one would expect that nonautistic children with communication disorders would also be delayed in theory-of-mind acquisition. There have been several attempts to study this
topic Specifically language-impaired (SLI) children
are sometimes used as controls for autistic children
(e.g., Leslie & Frith, 1988; Perner, Frith, Leslie, & Leekam, 1989) and generally do much better than autistic
children in theory-of-mind tasks. It should be noted,
however, that SLI is a very heterogeneous condition,
and that Shields, Varley, Broks, and Simpson (1996)
have found impaired performance on theory-of-mind
tasks by children with semantic pragmatic deficits
(those that would have the greatest eflFect on comprehension), but not in children with phonological and
syntactic deficits.
The technique pioneered by Hermelin and O'Con-
nor (1978) of comparing autistic groups with children
with specific sensory impairments has also been used.
For example, McAlpine and Moore (1995) studied theory of mind in blind children. Although blind children
are not impaired in verbal communication, they are
impaired in some forms of nonverbal communication,
and in particular are not able to detect eye direction:
a skill that Baron-Cohen and others (Baron-Cohen,
1993, 1994; Baron-Cohen, Campbell, KarmiloflfSmith, Grant, & Walker, 1995; Campbell, 1994) regarded as important, though not absolutely essential,
for the development of shared attention. McAlpine and
Moore (1995) did indeed find that blind children were
somewhat delayed in passing a false-belief task, though
this may have been in part due to the greater information-processing demands of such a task for children
who cannot use visual cues.
The focus of this study is performance on theoryof-mind tasks by prelingually deaf children. Being
born unable to hear does not automatically give rise to
communication difficulties: studies of deaf children
born to signing deaf parents have found a timetable of
language acquisition roughly parallel to that of hearing
children, including an early stage of manual babbling
(e.g., Pettito & Marentette, 1991). Nevertheless, only a
minority of deaf children have parents who are fluent
signers and thus a deaf child's linguistic development
is usually delayed, at least until he or she joins a community of native signers in primary school (and probably sometime beyond this, given the Total Communication, TC, ethos of most British schools for the deaf).
Several studies have found that relatively few hearing
parents achieve sufficient proficiency in manual communication to converse freely with their deaf children
about imaginary or unobservable topics (e.g., M. Harris, 1992; Marschark, 1993), and further evidence
shows that many deaf children start talking about others' mental states only when they start at a school for
the deaf (Wood, Wood, Griffith, & Howarth, 1986).
As a result of limited early exposure to language, it
seems many deaf children will be delayed in gaining
conversational access to information about the intangible thoughts and feelings of others. Furthermore, it is
plausible that this will delay theory-of-mind development. Consistent with this theory, Peterson and Siegal
(1995) reported that children aged 8—13 who were pro-
Understanding of Beliefs and Desires
foundly, prelingually deaf struggled with a false-belief
test: only 35% passed a version of the classic "SallyAnne" task (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985), which tests the
understanding that someone who has not seen an object being moved will believe it to be in its original
rather than actual location, and normally presents little
problem for hearing children past their fourth birthday.
The level of performance shown by deaf children did
not differ significantly from that reported for autistic
children of a comparable (nonverbal) mental age
(Baron-Cohen et al., 1985). These results were replicated in a later comparison of deaf and autistic children
across a wider age range (Peterson & Siegal, 1996).
This study was essentially a reexamination of the
claims made by Peterson and Siegal (1995), using an
English sample and a wider range of tests. A highly
similar, if slightly younger, sample of children participated in two different false-belief tests: the modified
Sally-Anne task used by Peterson and Siegal and
Baron-Cohen's (1991a) adaptation of a task devised by
Harris, Johnson, Hutton, Andrews, and Cooke (1989).
Inclusion of this second task, which demands emotion
prediction rather than behavior prediction, gave a
broader base on which to establish the children's understanding of false-belief, as recommended by Gray
and Hosie (1996). It also offered a comparison of children's understanding of desires with their understanding of beliefs.
There were two grounds for predicting that understanding of desires might be easier for the deaf children
than understanding of beliefs. The first was that some
previous studies suggest that both normal children
(Wellman & Bartsch, 1988; Wellman & Woolley, 1990)
and autistic children (Baron-Cohen, 1991a; Phillips,
Baron-Cohen, & Rutter, 1995) understand desires earlier and more easily than beliefs. The second is that it
may be possible to understand desires on the basis of
nonverbal communication (e.g., pointing), whereas the
understanding of beliefs is more likely to require verbal
communication.
Method
Participants. The 22 children (13 girls and 9 boys) were
drawn from two government-funded schools for deaf
children, one in London and one in Bristol. The two
187
schools shared a common teaching ethos and both
served children with a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. The schools used TC in their teaching, which
entailed the use of both British Sign Language (BSL)
and Sign-Supported English, with the aim that the
children should become bilingual in English and BSL.
All children were audiologically diagnosed as being
profoundly deaf: they had an average hearing loss of at
least 96 decibels in the better ear and had become deaf
prior to the onset of language acquisition. They all
were described by their teachers as using BSL as their
principal communication medium. Most came from
hearing families, though detailed information about
home background is not available. The mean age of the
children was 9 years 8 months (range: 5;8 to 12;4). No
subject had any known associated disabilities such as
autism, mental retardation, uncorrected visual impairment, or cerebral palsy. Each was judged by their
teachers to be within the normal range of intelligence.
(Most of these judgments were based on the teachers'
extensive observation of the children in a school setting. Some of the children had also been given standardized intelligence tests, but records of these were
not available to the experimenters. Unfortunately,
practical constraints also did not permit IQ_tests to be
given to the children in this study.)
Task design. All children carried out two tasks. Both
tasks lent themselves to use with deaf children for the
following reasons: they revolve around (a) simple vocabulary and (b) a storyline that is readily comprehensible and also, by virtue of the involvement of props,
visually salient.
Marble task. The materials were a female doll (40 cm
high), a furry cloth dog (30 cm high), a basket with fabric cover, a square box with fitted lid, and a marble.
The basic task was the same as that used by Peterson and Siegal (1995): Baron-Cohen et al.'s (1985)
adaptation of Wimmer and Perner's (1983) Sally-Anne
story-test of false-belief. The task begins like this: a
doll hides a marble in a basket and then goes off for a
walk. While she is gone, a second character appears,
moves the marble from the basket to a box and then
leaves. The first doll then returns to the scene and the
child being tested is asked where this doll will look for
188 Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 2:3 Summer 1997
her marble. Two control questions are finally asked,
which tap whether the child (a) has noted the marble's
new location and (b) can recall its original hiding place.
It was inappropriate to produce a sign-for-word
translation of the experimental script devised by
Baron-Cohen et al. (1985), but the content of this
script was faithfully rendered in the BSL version used
in the current experiment, as shown in the Appendix.
Following the reasoning of Peterson and Siegal, a
toy dog was substituted for the second doll of the classic Sally-Anne marble paradigm. Every time the dolls'
names are used in a classic version, they must be fingerspelled, and Peterson and Siegal found this posed
considerable difficulty for signing deaf children: it increased demands on both attention and memory and
presumably put poor spellers at a disadvantage.
Breakfast cereal task. The materials were a male doll (40
cm high), a mini-box of Rice Krispies (10 X 7 X 4 cm)
with either Weetabix or nothing inside, and a mini-box
of Weetabix (9 X 17 X 5 cm) with either Rice Krispies
or nothing inside.
The basic task was Baron-Cohen's (1991a) adaptation of an experiment developed by Harris et al. (1989).
This is a story-test designed to tap children's understanding of false-belief and also their appreciation of
beliefs and desires as causes of emotion. The story begins with two types of breakfast cereal being presented
to a hungry doll, who likes one of the cereals but not
the other. The child being tested is asked what the doll
would feel—happy or sad—if presented with (a) one
box, and (b) the other (desire test 1). The doll then
leaves the scene and the subject discovers that one of
the cereal boxes contains the normal contents of the
other (preferred) box, while this other box is empty.
The boxes are then resealed. When the doll returns, the
subject is once again asked what the doll would feel if
presented with either box (belief test). Finally, the subject watches as the surprising contents of each cereal
box are revealed to the doll; the subject is then asked
what the doll's emotions would now be if given either
box (desire test 2).
A faithful BSL translation of Baron-Cohen's
(1991a) experimental script (for first desire test, belief
test, and second desire test) was used. A retranslation
of the tasks into English is given in the Appendix. Following Baron-Cohen (1991a), questions within each of
the three tests were randomized to avoid any order
effect of children preferring to respond "happy" before
"sad" or vice versa. Memory questions were asked at
the beginning and end of the experiment, in order to
check whether each subject had noted and remembered
which of the cereals the doll preferred. A partiality
check was also made in order to establish that a subject's own preferences between the two cereals did not
confound task performance: in the last question posed,
each child was asked to sign which of the two they personally liked more. The preferences of the doll were
varied across trials: half the children were told the doll
liked Weetabix but disliked Rice Krispies; the other
half were told the reverse. In either case the preferred
cereal was located in the wrong box.
Overall procedure. Each child was tested individually in
an empty classroom in the school. They were seated
across a low table from two women: the experimenter
(LS) and a storyteller (KR). KR is profoundly deaf and
fluent in BSL, the children's principal means of communicating. She has signing abilities beyond the Stage
3 level. Most teachers in British signing schools for the
deaf would be expected to have reached Stage 2 (examining authority: Council for the Advancement of Communication with Deaf People).
KR told the stories involved in each task to each
child using BSL. Each step in the narrative was followed by illustrative enactment: LS manipulated the
animate characters and KR moved all other props in
accompaniment.
In order to counter fatigue or practice effects, half
the subjects were presented with the marble task before
the breakfast cereal task, and for the other half the order was reversed.
LS and KR independently recorded each child's
responses and were in complete agreement.
Children from the two schools did not differ in
their performance: no significant differences were
found on any task (Fisher's Exact in each case, p > .05,
2-tail test). This justified the pooling of data from the
two schools in all analyses.
Understanding of Beliefs and Desires
189
Table 1 Success on belief and desire tasks (out of 20 children who took
all tests)
Succeeded on Failed on Succeeded on Failed on
belief tasks
belief tasks desire tasks
desire tasks
Passed control
11
questions
Failed at least one 3
control question
Total
14
2
13
0
4
7
0
6
20
0
Results
Of the 22 children given the marble task, 15 (67%)
passed the control questions for the marble task, and 7
(33%) failed at least one of them. Omitting over a third
of the children from the analysis could have seriously
biased the results, so these children were included in
the rest of the study. However, the "control failers" and
"control passers" are separated in the table and in some
of the analyses.
A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was carried out on the whole initial sample of 22 children with
control question success (passed all controls versus
failed some controls) as the grouping factor, and age
as the dependent variable. This showed a significant
effect, with children who passed all controls tending
to be older than those who failed some controls
The children in this study performed significantly
better on the marble task than those deaf children studied by Peterson and Siegal (19/22 versus 9/26; x2 =
13.13; df= \;p< .01). They also performed considerably better than Baron-Cohen et al.'s (1985) autistic
children (19/22 versus 4/20; x2 = 18.62; df = \;p<
.01), while not differing significantly from their normal
children (19/22 versus 23/27; X2 = 0.014; df= \;p =
not significant [NS]).
Twenty out of 22 children passed the control questions on the breakfast task. The two who did not (aged
5;8 and 10;3) were not included in the rest of the study.
Sixteen of the 20 remaining children passed both belief
questions. All children who passed one belief question
passed the other as well.
There was no indication that a child's performance
was influenced by his or her own preference between
the two cereals: belief test pass-rates of subjectss whose
preference coincided with that of the doll did not differ
significantly from those of children with the opposite
preference (or indeed from the combined performance
of subjects who had the opposite preference to the doll
and subjects who were indifferent) (Fisher's Exact, p >
.05, 2-tail test).
The breakfast task had not been previously administered to deaf children. The children in this study performed significantly better than the autistic children in
Baron-Cohen's (1991a) study (16/20 versus 9/17; x2 =
14.3; df= 1; p < .01) and similarly to the normal children in that study (16/20 versus 14/19; x2 = 0.22; df=
,!;/> = NS).
However, the high success rate on the marble task
may be misleading, as only one belief question was
asked, whereas in many other studies, including that of
Peterson and Siegal (1995), two questions were asked.
This means that if the marble task were considered in
isolation, children in this study might appear to have
an artificially high success rate through chance alone.
Therefore, in subsequent analyses, children were
counted as successful on belief only if they passed the
marble task belief question and both breakfast task belief questions. As shown in Table 1, 14 children passed
all belief questions, and 6 failed some. No child failed
all the belief questions in both tasks.
A one-way ANOVA was carried out on the 20 children given the belief tasks with belief success (passed
versus failed) as the grouping factor and age as the dependent variable. The effect failed to reach significance
The overall rate of success on the belief task is 70%
190 Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 2:3 Summer 1997
as compared with 35% (9 out of 26) of Peterson and
Siegal's group of deaf children of hearing parents. The
difference between these percentages is significant
(X2 = 5.65;#-=l;/><.05).
In the breakfast task, the children were required to
justify all their judgments (both for belief and for desire). Ninety-eight percent of all their justifications
were correct: they referred (a) to the apparent (rather
than actual) contents, (b) to the doll's desires (e.g., "he
likes Weetabix"), or (c) in the belief test, to the doll's
restricted knowledge ("he didn't see inside").
It could be argued that children should not be
counted as having a true understanding of false belief
unless they pass the control questions as well as the belief questions. In fact, the necessity for such a criterion
is highly questionable, in view of the children's almost
universal success in justifying their judgments. Nonetheless, it seemed worth investigating how the use of
the most stringent possible criteria would affect results.
Due to the substantial number of control failers,
such criteria would reduce the number of successful
children to 11. The success rate would thus be reduced
to 55% (if we consider only the 20 children who received all tests) or even to 50% (if we consider the entire initial sample of 22 children). These figures are still
considerably greater than the 35% for Peterson and^
Segal's children, but due to the relatively small sample
sizes, the differences between the samples fail to reach
significance if these criteria are employed. If we take
the success rate in this sample as 11 out of 20 (55%),
then x2 (df= 1) = 1.91. If we take it as 11 out of 22,
then x2 (df= 1) = 1.16. Neither figure reaches significance.
However, even at the lowest possible estimate of
success rate on the belief task (50%), the children in
this sample are still performing significantly better
than Baron-Cohen's samples of autistic children This
is true whether their performance is compared with
Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith's (1985) children in the
two-question marble task (x2 = 4.11; df= 1; p < .05),
or with Baron-Cohen's (1991) children in the breakfast
belief task (x2 = 4.36; df= 1; p< .05). By contrast,
the children in Peterson and Siegal's (1995) study did
not differ significantly from the autistic children in
Baron-Cohen's studies.
All of the 20 children who were given the breakfast
test passed both desire questions. This universal success made more detailed analyses (e.g., by age) unnecessary. This task had not previously been given to deaf
children. The performance was considerably better
than that of the autistic children in Baron-Cohen's
(1991a) study (20/20 versus 9/18; x2 = \2;df= l;p<
.01). Comparisons with Baron-Cohen's (1991) normal
children were inappropriate due to the near-universal
success in both groups (20/20 versus 17/19).
A Wilcoxon sign test was used to compare children's performance on the belief and desire tasks. They
performed significantly better on the desire tasks [Wilcoxon statistic (6/20) = 0; p < .05].
Discussion
The extent of the difference in false-belief understanding between deaf children in this study and those in
Peterson and Siegal's (1995, 1996) studies depends
somewhat on the stringency of the criteria used to determine false-belief understanding. However, even
when stringent criteria are used, the children in this
study did not appear to be as severely delayed as those
in Peterson and Segal's (1995, 1996) studies.
There are at least two ways of explaining the discrepancies between these results and those reported by
Peterson and Siegal. First, it could be argued that the
children included in this study have developed some
theory of mind that children in the earlier study still
lacked, possibly as the result of greater language exposure. Such an argument is consistent with the fact that
the few deaf children of deaf parents (i.e., children who
had been brought up in a rich conversational environment using sign language) in Peterson and Siegal's
(1995, 1996) studies also showed unimpaired understanding of false belief. Moreover, when Clark, Schwanenflugel, and Everhart (1996) assessed the theory of
mind of deaf adults (who had presumably had far
greater language exposure than deaf children) by the
rather different technique of asking them to classify
cognitive verbs, they found no difference between deaf
and hearing adults.
At first sight, this argument may seem improbable,
given that the conspicuous difference in pass-rates for
the two samples is set against a background of highly
comparable life circumstances. Specifically, language
Understanding of Beliefs and Desires
exposure is likely to have been very similar for the two
groups, since (a) the majority of children had nonsigning parents, and (b) all four of the schools that children
were drawn from schools that were described as using
TC in teaching. In fact, the current sample might be
expected to have had marginally less exposure to language, given their somewhat younger age (although age
only offers a crude index of language exposure). However, it could still be that the English children had
somewhat greater or earlier exposure to sign language
than the Australian children. Moreover, some of the
children on Peterson and Segal's study had been taught
Sign-Supported English as a first medium of communication, whereas all the children in this study had
been taught both BSL and Sign-Supported English,
with BSL considered to be their primary communication medium. Despite the possibly greater initial
difficulty of learning more than one communication
system, BSL is a more "naturalistic" language, and as
such may be more conducive to rapid early language
acquisition, and to the ability to make use of any opportunities for conversation with members of the deaf
community.
An alternative explanation of the failure to replicate Peterson and Siegal's findings invokes the methodological differences between the two studies: perhaps
the poor performance reported by the previous researchers was the result of their style of task delivery.
Peterson and Siegal employed the following procedure:
one hearing adult spoke the story and manipulated the
props in accompaniment; after each stage in the narrative, an interpreter repeated the spoken statement
just given and simultaneously offered a translation in
signed English. This may be problematic on two
counts.
The first is that Peterson and Siegal state that their
children were "selected on the basis that each child
used sign language (signed English and or Auslan) as
his or her principal communication medium" (p. 465).
Children with Auslan as a first language would have
been at a notable disadvantage when presented with a
task in Sign-Supported English, and their failure to
grasp that desires and beliefs had to be taken into account may reflect poor comprehension of lip-reading
and signed English rather than a lack of theory of
mind. In this study, the task was given in BSL, which
191
was the children's principal communication medium
(although they were also familiar with Sign-Supported English).
The second is that the children's attention was divided in more than one way: children were confronted
with one adult who spoke while performing with toys
and a parroting second who simultaneously signed.
Thus, the children not only varied their gaze between
the face and hands of the adults in front of them, but
also had to shift attention from one adult to the other
throughout the experiment. Moreover, such a procedure would result in a relative lack of synchrony between story and actions. These problems may well have
led to the children becoming distracted at crucial
points: the effect of such distraction would likely be
particularly strong for children who already had some
difficulties with the language medium used in the experiment.
In the current study, the telling of the story running through each task was a fully coherent process:
each section of the narrative was conveyed just once
and in the children's first language, namely BSL; the
contribution of the two presenters was integrated and
the performance of both was essential to the presentation. These factors may have led to better performance.
Why was performance on the control questions
apparently worse in this study than in Peterson and
Siegal's (1995) study (and in many studies of normal
and autistic children), despite relatively good performance on belief questions (and excellent performance
on desire tasks)? There are at least two possible explanations.
The first possible explanation is that the children
in this study were a little younger on average than those
in Peterson and Siegal's (1995) study. Relative to their
normal peers, deaf children, and especially young deaf
children, have particular problems fully comprehending the task perhaps because the task is more attention
draining for deaf children, since for them it imposes
continuous demand on a single sensory modality (i.e.,
vision). Consistent with the age effect on control-test
success, children's attention spans tend to increase with
age (e.g., Sigman, Cohen, Beckwith, & Robert, 1991).
The second possible explanation is that the control
questions may have posed particular problems for reasons unrelated to the understanding of mental states.
192 Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 2:3 Summer 1997
In particular, they referred to past situations and so required the children to override their likely response
tendency to answer in terms of present states and instead to rely on memory. By contrast, the belief and
desire questions dealt with present states.
A related point is that it is possible that the children
tested in the current study gave full consideration to
the first (crucial) question, but when this was immediately followed by presentation of two further (control)
questions, their attention and application rapidly fell
off. This suggestion is perhaps more compelling because no new information, no more story, separates the
three test questions: the first question is more likely to
be accepted within the context of the interactive storytelling that has gone before; whereas the second and
third questions are further removed from the storytelling phase, and in this sense offer less incentive for the
subject to attend. This is not incompatible with the results cited by Peterson and Siegal (1995), on the basis
of the assumption that their children were less engaged
in understanding the story as a whole and more focused
on understanding each verbal statement as it came.
The latter hypothesis could be tested by varying
the order of presentation of crucial and control questions and investigating whether children perform better on the control questions if these are presented first.
This had not been done in this study for fear of biasing
responses to the crucial questions.
The importance of methodological factors does not
necessarily reduce the deaf children's performance
deficits to an artefact of the specialized testing situation. In many real-life situations as well, deaf children
are likely to be exposed to suboptimal communicative
contexts, which result in greater demands on their attentional and information-processing capacities than
would a more "user-friendly" context. This may have
considerable implications for deaf children's theory-of
mind abilities in naturalistic situations, if insufficient
attention is given to their communication needs.
So to what extent does delayed exposure to conversation delay acquisition of theory of mind? The fact
that these children performed better than Peterson and
Siegal's children should not obscure the fact that they
still performed less well than would be expected on the
basis of their chronological age. Indeed, if extremely
(probably excessively) stringent criteria for success are
used, the differences between these children and those
of Peterson and Segal (1995) ceased to be significant,
though they continued to perform significantly better
than Baron-Cohen's autistic children (Baron-Cohen et
aL, 1985; Baron-Cohen, 1991a). Even if one uses far
less stringent criteria and treats the different belief
tasks separately, the 80% success rate on the breakfast
task is presumably lower than would be expected for
this age range (though this assumption should be
tested by giving the task to hearing children 7 years old
and over).
Thus, deaf children of hearing parents do appear
to be somewhat, though not grossly, delayed in their
ability to pass false-belief tasks. Their problems may be
in comprehending the task as a whole, more than with
false belief as such, given that they were as likely to fail
control questions as belief questions. It must, however,
be remembered that two children (both over 7, and one
as old as 10; 10) failed the belief questions despite passing all control questions.
By contrast, the children in this study appeared to
have no problems in understanding desire. They performed perfectly on desire tests, whatever their age,
and whether or not they passed all control questions
(though it must be remembered that the two children
who failed the breakfast test control questions were excluded from the study).
The significant difference between performance on
the belief and desire questions is intriguing. It may
simply reflect differences in ease of task comprehension. It is, however, plausible that children with verbal
communication difficulties do understand desire better
than belief, because the former is more communicable
by nonverbal means (e.g., pointing, other gestures, and
facial expression). If this were the case, it would support the view that not only does communication experience play some role in the development of theory of
mind, but different forms of communication experience have differential effects on different aspects of theory of mind.
Further studies are needed if we are to gain a fuller
understanding of the extent to which deaf children are
delayed in theory-of-mind acquisition: severely delayed (as suggested by Peterson & Siegal, 1995),
slightly delayed (as suggested by this study), or not delayed at all. It would clearly be desirable to carry out a
Understanding of Beliefs and Desires 193
study of deaf children aged 4—5 years. If these young
deaf children fail to match the high pass-rates commonly achieved by hearing children of the same age,
then language and conversation will be implicated in
theory-of-mind development. Research attempting to
clarify this point empirically will have to address several issues. The number of younger children who failed
control questions in the current study highlights potential difficulties in testing 4- to 5-year-olds, and some
modified experimental format, which reduces attentional demand, may be called for. For very young and/
or language-delayed children, even this may not be
sufficient. The dilemma arises: if linguistic demands
are greatly simplified (e.g., by use of predominantly
nonverbal techniques and/or by removing demands
for justifications), then the task may become less demanding in other ways, and no longer be comparable
with standard theory-of-mind tasks. If linguistic demands are not simplified, then children with limited
language may fail for reasons unconnected with theory
of mind. Nonetheless, some attempt should be made
to investigate younger deaf children. Future studies
should also include language tests, to elucidate the relationship between language and theory-of-mind performance more precisely. Longitudinal studies would be
particularly useful, both for investigating the possiblity
of language ability "thresholds" for performance in
theory-of-mind tasks and for investigating the extent
to which the understanding of desire typically precedes
the understanding of belief.
Appendix
Experimental Script for Marble Task
Basket set up near left edge of table; box positioned far
right. Female doll (Ann) held in middle.
• What's this? . . . wait for reply. . . basket.
• What's this? . . . matt for reply . . . box.
• What's this?. . . matt for reply . . . girl.
over basket as marble placed under the cover there.
• Ann leaves. Ann walkedfromtable.
• Time passes . . . dog. Dog brought to table.
• He's nosey . . . sniffs. Dog moved towards basket, cover
removed.
• What's this? . . . wait for reply . . . marble.
• Dog and marble moved together over to box; marble hidden there.
• Dog leaves. Dog removedfromtable.
• Ssh! Ann doesn't know; don't tell Ann.
• Ann comes back. Ann brought to table.
• Belief She, marble looks where?
• Reality Marble now where?
• Memory First, marble put where?
Experimental Script for Breakfast Cereal Task
Male doll (Ben) sat on table with mini Weetabix box and
mini Rice Krispies box. Preferences of the doll varied
across trials: half the subjects told Ben liked Weetabix
but disliked Rice Krispies (as scripted below); other half
told the reverse. Contents of the boxes adjusted accordingly.
Desire Test 1
• What's this? . . . wait for reply . . . boy.
Name Ben
• He wakes up, goes downstairs, is hungry.
• What's this? . . . maitfor reply, e.g., subjectfingerspells
W. . E. . , etc., or shrugs to say sign not known . . . Weetabix.
• He likes Weetabix.
• What's this? . . . wait for reply . . . Rice Krispies.
• He doesn't like Rice Krispies.
• Memory 1 He likes which? Pointing to boxes.
• Give THIS box. Weetabix box moved towards Ben.
• Desire 1 Ben feels what? Prompt usually needed.
Happy or sad? Why?
• Give THIS box. Rice Krispies box moved towards Ben.
• Desire 2 Ben feels what? Why?
Name Ann
• Ann likes playing marbles. Marble producedfromKR's
pocket and that placed in Ann's hand.
• She's had enough . . . hides marble. Ann made to bend
Belief Test
• Ben leaves. Ben walkedfrom table
• L o o k i n s i d e this (Weetabix box). Yes o p e n i t . . . n o t h -
194
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 2:3 Summer 1997
ing! . . . Ssh! close it up.
• Look inside this (Rice Krispies box). What? . . . Weetabix! . . . Ssh! close it up.
• Boxes replaced on table as before, only their positions
swapped.
• Ben doesn't know; don't tell Ben.
• Ben comes back. Ben brought back to table.
• He has not opened this or this.
• Belief 1 Ben sees this (Weetabix box) feels what?
Why?
• Belief 2 Ben sees this (Rice Krispies box) feels
what? Why?
Desire Test 2
• Give Ben T H I S box (Weetabix). Open it. Box opened
and given to doll.
• Desire 3 Ben feels what? Why?
• Give Ben T H I S box (Rice Krispies.) Open it. Box
opened and given to doll.
• Desire 4 Ben feels what? Why?
Final Checks
• Preference You like which? Subject signs "Weetabix" or
"Rice Krispies."
• Memory 2 Ben likes which?
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