AUTHOR=Durrleman Stephanie , Burnel Morgane , De Villiers Jill Gibson , Thommen Evelyne , Yan Rachel , Delage Hélène 

TITLE=The Impact of Grammar on Mentalizing: A Training Study Including Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder and Developmental Language Disorder

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 10 - 2019

YEAR=2019

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02478

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02478

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=Training on complements in English, German and Mandarin has been reported to trigger improvements on both complements and Theory of Mind (ToM), with typically developing (TD) pre-schoolers on the verge of developing these skills (Hale & Tager-Flusberg, 2003; Lohmann & Tomasello, 2003; Shuliang, Yanjie, & Sabbagh, 2014). In the current study, we build on the idea that increasing mastery of complementation holds the promise of enhancing ToM, and seek (i) to replicate the positive effects observed in previous work for this effect in French-speaking TD children, and (ii) to pilot extending this to clinical children, more specifically those with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and Developmental Language Disorders (DLD), through exploring whether improvement in the latter, clinical groups follows that of the TD group. Sixty children with Theory of Mind (ToM) difficulties, 16 with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) (aged 5;6 to 11;8), 20 with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (aged 4;8 to 9;0) and 24 typically developing children aged (2;9 to 5;3 years), participated in a 4-week training program. Half received training targeting sentential complements and half received a control training targeting lexical skills. Complementation training, but not lexical training, led to a significant direct increase in complements, and also had the indirect effect of significantly boosting belief reasoning. TD and clinical groups followed the same patterns of performance. These results confirm previous findings for TD, and further suggest promising new directions for therapeutic programs addressing ToM delays in populations of different aetiologies, namely the incorporation of a motivating training on complementation.