2018 Sat Session C 0930

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Session C, Terrace Lounge | 9:30am

The impact of syntax on mentalizing: a training study in ASD and SLI
S. Durrleman, E. Thommen, H. Delage

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the capacity to attribute mental states, such as intensions, desires and beliefs and thereby predict and explain behaviours. Research has indicated difficulties with false-belief attribution in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) [1] as well as those with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) [2] and revealed a link between success at this aspect of ToM and mastery of sentential complements, such as: Claire says/thinks [that aliens landed in her garden] (ASD: [3,4]; SLI: [5,6]). Complements allow the representation of contradictions between mental states and reality, thus these structures arguably serve as ideal tools for representing subjective truths. In line with this, results from longitudinal studies have indicated that complementation appears to be a precursor for the comprehension of false-beliefs in both typical and atypical development [7,3].

Training studies with preschool typically-developing (TD) children have shown that enhancing sentential complements improves ToM performance [8,9], but the efficacy of this training has never been explored in clinical populations with attested ToM delays. The aim of the current investigation is to determine if children with ASD and SLI can also boost their ToM capacities thanks to training on complements. The study includes 57 children so far: 19 with ASD (6-12 years), 18 with SLI (5-9 years), and 20 TD children (3–5 years). Participants have been split into two groups: One group benefitted from a newly developed training program of i-Pad applications aiming to enhance complementation with verbs of communication (e.g. say, shout, answer). Complements of verbs of mental states (i.e. think, believe…) were avoided in order to disentangle mental state lexicon from the complement structures trained. The other group completed an alternative, control training involving i-Pad applications enriching the general lexicon, so as to ensure the specificity of the effects of the syntactic training. Both programs included 10-12 training sessions of 30 minutes, spread over 4-5 weeks, amounting to 5 to 6 hours in total. At the onset of training, groups benefitting from the target and control training programs did not differ on age, non-verbal reasoning [10], complements [7] or ToM, whether assessed verbally [11] or non-verbally [12]. Results indicate that the group of children in the lexical training did not improve performance on complements or ToM, but scored significantly higher in lexical post-tests as compared to pre-tests (p=.002). In contrast, the group trained on complements did not improve in lexicon, but showed a direct improvement in complementation abilities (p<.001), as well as in false-belief ToM skills (p<.001). Subgroup analyses on the populations with complementation training revealed that children with TD and SLI increased both verbal and non-verbal ToM task performance, while children with ASD improved only in the non-verbal ToM assessments. This may stem from the heightened demands on executive functions, such as inhibition and working memory, involved in the verbal ToM assessments, which were absent from the non-verbal ToM tests. If more substantial cohorts continue to uphold that complementation training is efficient for addressing ToM delays, this could indicate new directions for ToM remediation programs.