Does learning another language matter to

Does learning another language
matter for Theory of Mind?
-Young Children’s Bilingualism and Theory of
Mind Development

Student ID NO.

1320299

Word Count: 12,746

This dissertation was supervised by Professor
Gwyneth Doherty-Sneddon, with help from Dr.
Martin Doherty. Also many thanks to Panda
Club, Glasgow Chinese School and Alba Cathay
Chinese School Edinburgh for their support in
the participant recruitment for this study.

Content
Abstract

.…………………………………………. 4

Introduction …………………………………………... 6
Methods

………………………………………….. 27

Result

………………………………………….. 36

Discussion

………………………………………….. 47

Reference

.................................................................. 62

Appendix

…...……………………………………… 68

Abstract
Previous research had established the close relation between metalinguistic awareness
and Theory of Mind development. Most of these studies focused on children’s
phonological, syntactic and semantic awareness and their relation with false belief
task performances. However, the metalinguistic tasks often suffered from the
complication of executive functioning. Criticism claimed that the results of these
tasks failed to reflect children’s metalinguistic ability purely. In the current study
which pursued a similar research question, levels of bilingualism were used as the
medium between Theory of Mind development and metalinguistic awareness
development, without involving metalinguistic tasks. Moreover, the study intended to
investigate the effect direction of secondary language acquisition and the pattern of it
on first language proficiency.
Three groups of children aged between 3-7 years were recruited for this study,
including 10 British monolinguals, 8 Chinese children adopted by British families,
and 9 Chinese children living with their biological parents in Britain. Their English
language proficiency was measure with Test for Early Language Development-3.
Theory of mind tasks included an unexpected transfer task, an unexpected content

task and a Droodle task.
The findings of this study did not confirm the hypothesis that levels of bilingualism
can predict children’s Theory of Mind task performance. Instead, children’s
expressive language age was a much better precursor across all three groups. Also
learning a second language does not necessarily affect the first language proficiency.
It was the pattern of bilingual acquisition that influences English, especially receptive

English language ability. Sequential bilingual children had an advantage in receptive
language compared to the simultaneous learners. However, inconsistent or insufficient
language support of second language may lead to a negative effect in the first
language acquisition.

Introduction
Children, especially young children, perceive the world differently from adults in
many ways. From how they see the spatial position of objects (Piaget & Inhelder,
1948 & 1956), to how they understand others’ beliefs and intentions (Baron-Cohen,
1991), children experience many cognitive and conceptual changes before reaching
adulthood. One topic of particular interest among these areas is referred to as Theory
of Mind. The definition of Theory of Mind has been diverse and rather debatable
among those who do human research. How the term first entered the developmental

literature has two possible routes. Wellman (1979, 1985) initially employed this term
to refer to a child’s conception of human cognition in his work on metacognition. On
the other hand animal’s capability of attributing knowledge and mental states to
others was also referred to as Theory of mind in behavioural research on chimpanzees
(Premack & Woodruff, 1978).
Later research mostly focused on young children in typically developing population
(Wimmer & Perner, 1983), children with deafness (Courtin, 2000) and those with
Autistic Spectrum Disorders (Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1985; Leslie, 1991;
Moore, 2002; Baker, 2003). The scope of this concept is in fact much larger than the
way it was presented above, from Bretherton, McNew and Beeghly-Smith’s (1981)
infant communicative abilities to Wimmer and Perner’s (1983) interpretation of
representational nature in Theory of Mind development. Gopnik and Wellman (1994)
defined the term as a domain-specific, psychologically real structure, composed of an
integrated set of mental-state concepts employed, predicting people’s actions and
interactions that are recognised over time when faced with counterevidence to its

predictions. Of course, there have been some researchers who are reluctant to use this
term and even deny that children develop any theory about mind or mental states
(Hobson, 1991). However, in the past twenty years, both the research interest and
effort in Theory of Mind development have had significant growth. Theory of Mind is

now used to refer to three phenomena- a cognitive structure leading to certain
abilities, an area of research investigating these abilities, and a theoretical perspective
explaining this development (Akingston & Baird, 2005).The fact that Theory of Mind
invokes such a great field of concepts and phenomena, including the cognitive
structure, the theories explaining the mechanism of this structure and what this
structure implies, contributes to the diverse academic opinions to a great extent.
Therefore it is worthwhile refining the use of Theory of Mind in this study as follows:
a cognitive structure which allows one to develop concepts of others’ action and
interaction and thus infer their intentions and predict actions. In other words, having
acquired Theory of Mind, one should be able to understand with good reasoning that
people have different mental states, and that their actions are affected by these mental
states.
However, even among those who argue for the theories of Theory of Mind, the age of
acquiring Theory of Mind had been controversial. Early research was dominated by
Piaget’s theories on children’s egocentrism, which claimed that the ability to
understand mental states did not emerge until roughly the age of 7 years. For
example, in his Three Mountain Task, children were asked to reproduce the threedimensional model of the spatial relationship between three different mountains after
the point of view had been changed (Piaget & Inhelder, 1948 & 1956). This task

required children to conceptualise the spatial relationship between objects and

produce answers accordingly. The emergence of Theory of Mind had been dismissed
as a form of ‘cognitive escape from Egocentrism’ (Doherty, 2006). Piaget’s testing
methods had been criticised for the demanding task setups and the consequential
underestimation of test performance (Doherty, 2006). It is now generally agreed that
children develop, or show signs of development of Theory of Mind between the ages
of 4 and 5 years (Perner, 1991).
Examining children’s Theory of Mind development often involves tasks requiring
children to consider the situations where others hold different mental states from
theirs or where there is a conflict between belief and reality. One of the first
standardised tests to examine children’s acquisition of Theory of Mind was the falsebelief task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). False-belief tasks come in many forms and
modifications. The most popular ones are change-of-location task (Wimmer & Perner,
1983), unexpected identity task (Gopnik & Astington, 1988) and appearance-reality
task (Flavell, 1986). Typically, the tested child would be told a story where one
character is deceived with some information, for example, the location of a toy, the
true object concealed in a box, or telling a lie in the case of secondary false belief
(Doherty, 2006). The tested child would then need to make inference of a character’s
response to certain questions according to how much knowledge of truth the
characters have. Passing such tasks indicates the ability to understand mental states
and the possibility of belief–reality conflict.
Researchers have put enormous effort into explaining the mechanism behind Theory

of Mind development, especially why 4 years is the crucial age and what aspects of

cognitive and biological development facilitate Theory of Mind development. Most
researchers focused their attention on social interactions and (or) language
acquisition. As a part of children’s social interaction, pretend play is considered to be
closely involved in Theory of Mind development (Astington & Jenkins, 1995).
Similarly, Gillespie (2007) brought forward position exchange theory, suggesting that
through daily activities, such as role play and observation of daily activities, children
learn to take perspectives of different social roles. For example, being a mummy
means that you put a baby into a buggy and push it around; being a policeman means
that you wear uniforms and catch bad guys. Although the term Theory of Mind was
not directly used in this developing theory, taking perspective involves
comprehension of differences between different social roles and the certain way they
are expected to be. On the other hand, language development and acquisition are
considered another possible facilitator of Theory of mind development. The research
in this area has been mostly in these three directions: conversation input (Dunn et al.,
1991), general language proficiency (Astington & Jenkins, 1999), and the
representational nature of language (Doherty & Perner, 1998; Farrer et al., 2005).
Dunn et al. (1991) found a positive correlation between family conversational input
and a child’s performance on false-belief tasks. However, there are many ways to

interpret this finding besides the causal relation between the two variables. General
language ability is also a major research interest and there have been numerous
studies in both typically developed children (Astington & Jenkins, 1999; Hughes &
Dunn, 1998; Jenkins & Astington, 1996; Ruffman et al, 2003) and clinical samples,
especially children with autism (Happé, 1995; Tager-Flusberg & Joseph, 2005). These

studies all revealed the strong correlation between language competence and Theory
of Mind development. While the relationship is undoubtedly evident, many debate the
interpretation of such a relationship. First, language competence and Theory of Mind
generally develop with age. The positive correlation may be merely the evidence of
age as the mutual factor. Secondly, false-belief tasks are quite often verbal tasks and
good performance demands high language competence from children, which does not
independently reflect children’s understanding to false belief (Bloom & German,
2000).
Investigating the semantic aspect of language instead of

the general language

proficiency, Doherty (1998, 2000) argued that there is a fundamental mechanism
shared by Theory of Mind development and the ability to understand the

representational nature of language (Perner, 1991).

Perner (1991) claimed that

language is symbolically represented by pronunciation and writing, which is a form
of non-mental presentation. The ability to understand this relation between the
representation and the representational content, which is the meaning of language, is
closely linked to the understanding of others’ belief and desire. Other researchers are
also keen to investigate the relations between Theory of Mind development and
different aspects of language. Instead of measuring children’s receptive vocabulary or
general language ability, different kinds of semantic and syntactic measurements are
taken and correlated with false-belief understanding. One focus has been
metalinguistic awareness.
Metalinguistic awareness is the ability to consciously and systematically reflect on
one’s knowledge of language, especially the representational nature of language,

separated from its representational content (Doherty, 2008; Farrar et al, 2005). The
components of metalinguistic awareness are very much relevant to the components of
language: phonological awareness (Blachman, 2000), grammatical awareness (de
Villier & de Villier, 1972), as well as semantic awareness (Doherty & Perner, 1998).

As a communication tool, language naturally conveys information, or its
representational content. Representation represents something being in a certain way
(Perner, 1991). Thus, a representation is not just an object itself, but also evokes
something else. For example, a photo of you is a piece of paper with picture on it, but
nonetheless reminds others of ‘you’. Typically, a photo, as well as language, is a nonmental representation, whereas mental states are mental representations. When you
are thinking of, say, your mother, the mental state ‘thinking’ is in fact the mental
representation of your mother. However, language and mental states share the
characteristics of aboutness: representation is about its representational content
(Perner, 1991). This similarity between mental and non-mental representation plays
an important role in the research on metalinguistic awareness. It has been
hypothesised that Theory of Mind development occurs at roughly the same age as
metalinguistic awareness (Doherty & Perner, 1998; Doherty, 2000, 2006).
Specifically for children, metalinguistic awareness is the ability to understand, to
some degree, that language does not only convey information, but can also be
separated from that information. In other words, can children tell which two words
rhyme in a sentence even though the meaning of the words does not make any
semantic sense? Can they produce synonyms or point out which two words mean the
same thing? The big question is, while most psychologists currently agree that

metalinguistic awareness has a close relation with representation, when does it

develop? The hypothesised timing varies from as early as when children start to
develop speech (interaction hypothesis), to 5–7 years (autonomy hypothesis).
Interaction hypothesis suggests that children have a reflective understanding of
language acquisition, which interacts with learning (Clark, 1978; Clark & Anderson,
1979; Marshall & Morton, 1978). This understanding of language may begin from the
early stages of language acquisition, before 2 years of age. The opposite view is that
children’s linguistic ability is only ‘epilinguistic’ in early years, rather than reflective
and intentional learning based on systematically collected knowledge (Gombert,
1990/1992). This is known as the autonomy hypothesis, which claims that
metalinguistic awareness develops separately at the age of 5–7 (Gombert, 1990/1992;
Hakes, 1980; Tunmer & Herriman, 1984; Van Kleeck, 1982).
However, the metlinguistic awareness studies connected with theory of mind
development suggested otherwise. The rationale behind investigating metalinguistic
awareness with theory of mind is that they both require children to have some
understanding of representation. As discussed above, the comprehension of the nonmental representational nature of language is reflected by metalinguistic awareness.
On the other hand, theory of mind is the ability to take others’ perspective, or to
reflect upon others’ mental states, which are mental representation. Both notions
demand children to have at least some understanding of the representational relation
between representation and its representational content. For language, it is about
separating the symbolic language and its meaning; for mental states, children need to
understand that they do not necessarily correspond to reality. As Doherty and Perner

(1998) predicted, metalinguistic awareness emerges at roughly the same age as theory
of mind, which is around 4–4½ years.
In this study (Doherty & Perner, 1998), 3- to 5-year-old children were recruited to
perform in a traditional false-belief task, which required children to predict where a
protagonist would look for an unexpectedly moved object. A correct response
indicates the demonstration of Theory of Mind, since it shows children’s ability to
understand the conflict between others’ belief and reality. Following the false-belief
task, children were asked to name a familiar object, e.g. rabbit, then to monitor
another person’s attempt to name the same object with a different word, e.g. bunny.
Essentially, this is a metalinguistic test in which children have to be able to recognise
the possibility and correctness of synonyms. The performance of the two tasks
correlated strongly at the age of 4, even after the effects of willingness and verbal
intelligence are controlled for. In the later parts of the study, the results showed that
younger children’s difficulties with metalinguistic tasks did not extend to a control
task of equivalent logical structure and complexity. Also it seems unlikely that
children’s difficulty with the synonym task was due to a reluctance to produce a
different answer, but the inability to generate a different description of the same item.
To sum up the findings, this study indicates that children can demonstrate
metalinguistic awareness as early as 4 years of age, which is roughly the same
predicted age in theory of mind development, with a strong statistical correlation
between the performances on the two types of tasks.
Doherty (2000) extended the findings to homonymy. A homonym is a word with two
different meanings. In this study, children were asked to either select or judge another

person’s choice of a different object with the same name, avoiding the same object or
misname. The performance correlated strongly with children’s understanding of
synonymy and false belief, even after the effects of verbal intelligence, chronological
age and control measures were partialled out. Doherty (2000) concluded his findings
as indicating ‘that children’s ability to understand homonymy results from their
ability to make a distinction characteristic to representation, a distinction fundamental
to both metalinguistic awareness and theory of mind’. In other words, an appropriate
understanding of the representational nature of language may be required for both the
development of metalinguistic awreness and Theory of Mind.
While Doherty and Perner’s research focused on semantic awareness, Farrar et al.
(2005) examined children’s phonological awareness with a rhyming task, and
phonological tests where children had to delete phonological parts of words with
increasing difficulty. Afterwards, a measure of the standard theory of mind tasks was
taken. The findings suggested that both language ability and theory of mind may be
required for phonological awareness to develop, further supporting Doherty and
Perner’s (1998) prediction. However, this study is faced with the challenge of an
alternative interpretation: both the rhyming and phonological tasks required children
to cognitively process the phonological information of a set of words without
considering their meaning (Oakhill & Kyle, 2000). To perform well in rhyming tasks,
children to ignore the meaning of words, but focus on the phonological features
instead. The phonological awareness tasks again required these abilities as well as
employing working memory to delete unwanted part of a word. While putting the
meanings temporarily aside, the demand of working memory may increase and even

exceed the capacity of young children. Therefore, it is possible that younger
children’s inability to demonstrate phonological awareness is due to executive
function limitation rather than a failure to understand representation (Farrar et al.,
2005).
The failure to eliminate this possibility was due to the design of the above experiment
where children’s phonological awareness was tested through a task that potentially
demands higher level executive function in children than they can manage. This is
nonetheless hard to avoid. Fundamentally, including the semantic awareness tasks
(Doherty & Perner, 1998; Doherty, 2000), the tests of metalinguistic awareness all
involved children’s effort in avoiding the representational content of language to
some degree while generating a response. It seems very difficult to test metalinguistic
awareness without involving the cognitive demand of executive functioning.
Executive functioning is essentially the cognitive process which enables a person to
manage or regulate a collection of cognitive tasks (Baddley, 1986). Executive
functioning includes planning, initiation, organisation and execution of tasks as well
as the ability to cope with transition or regulate emotional responses (Baddley, 1986).
It can be seen as an executive body which oversees and manages a series of cognitive
tasks of a person, from the order of the tasks to the actual conduct of them (Norman
& Shallice, 2000). Executive functioning can act as an assistant to self-control
(Posner & Synder, 1975). If one were to achieve a task goal, organisation is not the
only concern. A person would need to be able to control action, thoughts, attention
and emotion to perform the simplest activity. This is even more crucial for children,
who are easily distracted due to short attention span (Ruff & Lawson, 1990). Not

having this kind of control means that the ability of taking in new information,
making decisions, and keeping track of thoughts or goals would be extremely
difficult. Thus executive functioning is closely related to children’s learning
difficulties and classroom performances (Gathercole & Alloway, 2004). Also the
operation of executive functioning draws on short-term memory and working
memory in order to coordinate different tasks and time-series.
There are three dimensions in executive function: inhibition of proponent responses,
updating and monitoring working memory representations, and shifting between tasks
and mental sets (Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977; Rabbitt, 1997). Inhibition of proponent
responses is the ability to deliberately inhibit powerful or automatic responses. This
can be illustrated with the Stroope Task (Stroope, 1935). Participants in the Stroope
task are shown a series of words printed in different colours. These words are all
nouns standing for names of colours. However, the meaning and the actual colour of
the words are never corresponding. The participants are then required to respond with
the actual colour of the word instead of the meaning. For example, if the word ‘red’ is
presented in blue print, the correct response would be ‘blue’ instead of ‘red’. So to
perform well in this task, one needs to inhibit the habit of reading out the words and
adopt the new rule of saying the print colour. Updating and monitoring working
memory representations involves keeping the relevant information of current tasks,
retrieving and modifying it when necessary. Finally there is shifting between tasks
and mental sets, which involves producing different types of responses to the same
stimuli. For example, the Wisconsin Card Sorting task (Berg, 1948) asks participants
to sort the cards according to certain criteria, e.g. ‘shape’. While not being informed

of the criteria, participants are told whether it is correct or not after each response,
thus inferring the criteria. After a period of time, the criteria would change, and the
ability of shifting would allow participants to spot this change soon enough and act
accordingly. Participants with working memory or executive functioning would
instead keep making responses according to the initial criteria.
Therefore, it is obvious how the design of most metalinguistic awareness tasks
demand both executive functioning and language proficiency. The rhyming tasks
(Farrar et al., 2005) demanded children to inhibit the tendency to seek the semantic
association between words and attend to their phonological properties instead. In
semantic metalinguistic awareness tasks (Doherty & Perner, 1998; Doherty, 2000),
children had to be able to produce synonyms and homonyms of the same word or the
same object in the picture, which is giving different responses to the same stimuli in
nature. It is very difficult to see how research design can avoid this confound when
testing for metalinguistic awareness for two reasons. The operation of executive
functioning is involved in almost all high level cognitive processes (Baddley, 1986).
Investigation of cognitive behaviours can not be separated from employing executive
functioning at some stage. Also, measuring metalinguistic ability means exploring
human responses in situations where participants need to constantly reflect upon their
knowledge of language and alter their responses according to the experimental
requirement. This makes it impossible to measure metalinguistic awareness alone.
One alternative is to investigate the Theory of Mind development of participants
whose metalinguistic awareness is pre-acquired to be at different levels. Therefore, a
participant can be assigned to a group labelled as having high or low metalinguistic

awareness instead of demonstrating such cognitive ability through testing.
Bilingualism can provide researchers with such opportunity. The term ‘bilingualism’
is used very loosely here, referring to learning more than language. Thus there are
levels of bilingualism among individuals learning a second language due to their
varied proficiency in the second language. The important question is: how do levels
of bilingualism identify the levels of metalinguistic awareness? Doherty and Perner
(1998) interpreted their findings as indicating a fundamental conceptual basis that
both metalinguistic awareness and theory of mind can be based on. Representation is
the core in this fundamental conceptual basis. Language is a tool for communication
and a representation for information audibly, visually and symbolically (Perner,
1991). Similar to the picture example, the word ‘lamp’ looks nothing like an actual
lamp. However, an educated person would know what it means by drawing on the
already established association between the written/pronounced form and its meaning.
The same applies for different language learners. Following this rationale, learning
two languages requires one to understand the rules of two different sets of
representation, to reflect upon and distinguish such rules, and to be able to shift
between the two when the setting demands. This diversity increases when the two
languages in question are from two completely distinct lingo-systems. For example,
modern English has German roots and is considered an indo-language, whereas
Chinese is a strictly non-indo language. Such difference implies that the two
languages share little in common in terms of pronunciation, writing or grammar.
Different language systems influence their learner differently at the early stage of
acquisition. Children whose mother tongue is English or Italian tend to show ‘noun

advantage’, which is closely related to the naming games between mother and child in
these cultures. The exposure to nouns is much more compared to verbs, which have
complicated forms in different tenses or with different pronouns (Caselli, 2001).
However, this is a different scenario with non-indo languages. , Gopnik & Choi(1995)
found that Chinese and Korean children learn nouns and verbs in their language at
roughly the same pace. A possible explanation is that there is no verb transformation
in these languages. For example, changes of tense only involve adding an adverb of
time in Chinese. This feature makes verb more at a comprehensible level for young
children. The mothers are less likely to be reluctant to use them when communicating
with their children.
The differences in writing between two language systems also influence children’s
literacy ability. Bialystok and Herman (1999) suggested that bilingual learners pay
more attention to the relation between the form of a word (visual or audio) and its
meaning. This effect is even stronger when the two languages in question are from
two different systems. Bilingual children who learn two different writing systems
(e.g. English and Chinese) develop a better understanding of the function of the
written symbols, than monolingual children or bilingual children learning from one
language systems (e.g. English and French). On the other hand, bilingual children
who do learn from one language system benefit on a phonological level. They are
more likely to succeed in tasks requiring sensitivity to sound properties of words than
monolinguals (Bialystok&Herman, 1999). However, this advantage did not show
among bilingual children of different language systems.

The above findings all yield the cognitive effect that bilingualism may have towards
children’s metalinguistic awareness development. Bilingual children develop a
conscious ability to distinguish between two language systems between the age of 3
and 6 years (Miller, 1978), which is close to the hypothesised development age for
Theory of Mind (Doherty & Perner, 1998). This is hardly a coincidence, since the
occurrence of code mixing and code switching can offer a plausible explanation, if
combined with Perner (1991)’s representation theory. Code mixing happens at all
levels in a bilingual child’s speech, including pronunciation of a word, vocabulary,
grammar and even the message conveyed (Buckley, 2003). For example, an
English/French bilingual child can use a French word in an English sentence or hold
one side of a conversation in French while the other speaker uses English only. A
demonstration of such cases is as follows:
Mother: How old are you?
Child: Quarter (four), I think.
Mother: I thought you are five.
Children: Non, je ne pas. (No, I’m not)
This kind of code mixing and switching enable children to consider the
representational function and relation of the two languages as well as their
differences. Activities like this greatly resemble synonyms and homonyms tasks in
Doherty and Perner (1998) and Doherty (2000) studies. In fact, code mixing and
switching evidently increases as the competence in both languages increases among
bilingual adults (Poplack, 1979). Thus bilingualism could act as the perfect medium

between metalinguistic awareness and Theory of mind. Bilingual children, especially
those learning languages from two completely different systems, are expected to have
a higher metalinguistic level than monolinguals.
Naturally, being able to acquire two languages and manipulate them at any level
could not be possibility achieved without the operation of executive functioning.
However, it is possible to recruit participants with the same type of first language
acquisition, but different in their second language acquisition, and put them into
different groups according to the second language competence. To standardise this
variable, all participants have to share the same first and second languages. Therefore
the metalinguistic ability is not measured, but scientifically estimated and organised
to correlate with false-belief task performance. The complication of executive
functioning can be overcome by avoiding metalinguistic tasks, but drawing samples
from a population whose levels of metalinguistic awareness can be estimated.
Besides the cognitive advantages, learning another language has direct implications
with first language acquisition. For years, the debate on the direction of effect has
been a focus of attention among linguistics, education and psychology professionals
(Buckley, 2003). It was initially considered useful to learn more than one language,
for it means acquiring another skill. Later research showed mixed results, especially
those that report ‘language loss’. Most research in this field focuses on children from
a minority background (Winsler et al, 1999). For example, in the UK, English is the
language used in the greater society and formal communication, whereas Mandarin or
Cantonese are considered to be community languages among people from minority
ethnic group. Thus English is the majority language in this case, and Chinese

languages are the minority language. Children from this background would ideally
achieve what is called ‘balanced bilingualism’, where individuals show high and
relatively equal levels of competence in two languages (Buckley, 2003). However,
this is not always the case. The weaker language spoken by people who are bilingual
is sometimes subject to an interference effect from the dominant language (Buckley,
2003). This effect is often reported by parents of bilingual children as ‘mixing up’
things. In fact, it could occur at all levels of language acquisition, including tone,
vocabulary and grammar. It is common to hear a French child speaking English with
a French accent. Sometimes, a Japanese/English bilingual would say ‘I you see’
instead of ‘I see you’, which is a sign of interference from Japanese grammar.
Children from a minority language background are often in the process of
‘simultaneous bilingual acquisition’, according to the reports from their parents. They
learn two languages roughly at the same time, one spoken more at home or in the
community, and the other is required in the greater social environment. This is not the
only way how children become bilingual. Many children, mostly from a middle-class
and ethnic majority background, experience ‘additive bilingualism’ (Winsler et al,
1999). These language majority children learn a second language in a supportive
cultural context and this type of bilingual acquisition is ‘sequential’. The difference
between simultaneous bilingual acquisition and sequential bilingual acquisition is that
sequential bilingual learners have pre-existing knowledge of language (Madhani,
1994). They can use this implicit knowledge and apply it when learning a second
language. They are aware of the communicative nature of language, and what can be
achieved by communication. They also know that words stand for meanings and there

are rules of speaking a language both grammatically and socially. Although rules for
language differ across cultures, this implicit understanding of language gives children
a starting point when learning a new language. Children are more likely to form
strategies employing this knowledge and referring to the mutual rules to make
learning easier. For example, if one already knows that changing forms of a word can
change tenses or singular/plural forms in English, he is very likely to draw on such
rules in learning French. However, Buckley (2003) claimed that “Provided that they
receive appropriate amounts of input in both languages, there is no evidence to
suggest that sequential bilingual learners are any less proficient than simultaneous
bilingual learners”. This claim seems to be contrary to the strategic advantage
suggested by Madhani (1994), which implied that sequential bilingual learners
should, theoretically demonstrate more language proficiency in early childhood. It
would be interesting to investigate the conflicting claims further.
Concluding from the above, bilingual acquisition faces quite an intense dilemma.
Between monolingual and bilingual, there is much evidence of the cognitive,
metacognitive, metalinguistic and sociolinguistic benefit of learning another language
(Bain, 1996; Bialystock, 1988, 1991; Díaz, 1985; Galambos & Hakut, 1988; Hakuta,
1987; Hakuta & Díaz, 1985; Kessler & Quinn, 1980). On the other hand, the danger
of language loss and interference is always present. Moreover, between simultaneous
bilinguals and sequential bilinguals, the strategies employed in bilingual acquisition
are very different and may lead to different language proficiency. Researchers have
been debating the theoretical and practical implications of learning another language
for decades.

The current study aimed to examine the relationship between metalinguistic
awareness and Theory of Mind development among the children who are at the
crucial development age. However, the differences in metalinguistic awareness were
not reflected through phonological or semantic awareness tasks, but through the
different levels of bilingualism (English as the first language/Chinese as the second
language), which varied from monolingual to systematically educated bilingual.
Higher level of bilingualism acted as the indicator of higher level of metalinguistic
awareness in this case. By comparing Theory of Mind task performance between
groups of children with different levels of bilingualism, the findings in Doherty’s
studies (1998, 2000) were further investigated. The study also intended to compare
different aspects of general English competency and their relation with Theory of
Mind development. Moreover, the study included monolingual children and those
with patterns of simultaneous and sequential bilingual acquisition, and compared their
general proficiency in English, in hope of investigating the direction of effect in
bilingual acquisition and clarifying the conflict between Buckley (2003) and Madhani
(1994). Finally the study compared the general language proficiency as well as
Theory of Mind tasks performance between children with high and low Chinese
exposure among the sequential bilinguals, to examine whether different levels of
exposure to Chinese effect English acquisition and Theory of Mind development.
To include all variables including different levels of bilingualism, patterns of
bilingual acquisition and levels of Chinese exposure, the current study recruited
British monolingual children, Chinese children adopted by British families, and
British born Chinese children. Chinese only entered the British education system very

recently (Scottish Qualifications Authority, 2009). Therefore a sample of bilingual
British Children in Chinese and English is not accessible. Adopted Chinese children
started their language acquisition in an English environment and their families are
more likely to expose them to Chinese language to maintain their cultural heritage
(Gill & Jackson, 1982). However, their resource and language exposure intensity are
not as much and well-organised as children of Chinese immigrants in Britain, who
have regular access to Chinese language exposure at home, in Chinese schools and
Chinese community. Thus, adopted Chinese children acquire Chinese in a sequential
pattern and their bilingualism is of lower level compared to British born Chinese
children, who are also simultaneous bilinguals.
The experimenter hypothesises that:
1)

Children with different levels of bilingualism demonstrate different performance
in Theory of Mind tasks. Systematically educated bilinguals would have the best task
performance, followed by adopted children, then the monolinguals.

2)

The outcomes of general English proficiency positively correlate with Theory of
mind tasks performance.

3)

The English proficiency of monolingual children is not different from that of
sequential or simultaneous bilingual children.

4)

The English proficiency of sequential bilingual children is greater than that of
simultaneous bilingual children.

5)

Among the sequential bilinguals, there is no difference in general English
proficiency between children with high Chinese exposure and those with low Chinese
exposure.

6)

Among the sequential bilinguals, the children with high Chinese exposure
demonstrate better performance in Theory of Mind tasks compared to the children
with low Chinese exposure.

Methods
Participants
There were three groups of participating children recruited for this research: a
Monolingual group (N=10), an Adoption group (N=8) and a Bilingual group (N=9).
Children in all three groups were aged between 3 and 7 years and currently residing
in the UK.
The 10 children in the Monolingual group (age mean=46.9 months, SD=6.2) were
native British children whose first language was English and who were living with
their biological parent(s). They were recruited via the playgroup in the Department of
Psychology in the University of Stirling. The Adoption group (age mean=54.5
months, SD=12.6) consisted of ethnically Chinese children who had been adopted by
British families from mainland China before the age of 18 months. Most children in
this group were contacted through the Central Scotland International Adoption
Support Group (Panda Club), as well as one currently living in England. The
Bilingual group (age mean=60, SD=16.3) included ethnically Chinese children who
had been born in the UK and were living with their biological parents. This group was
recruited with the support of the Glasgow Chinese School and the Alba
CathayChinese School in Edinburgh.
Thus English was the first language for all three groups. However, the level of
Chinese (mainly Mandarin, only one child in the Bilingual group was from a
Cantonese-speaking family) was different among the groups. The Monolingual group
had little or no previous exposure to any other language beside English. The Adoption

group was at an intermediate level among the three, since most children were exposed
to audio and visual Mandarin materials. Some children attended a monthly Chinese
playgroup (Panda Club). Within the Adoption group, the children were further
divided into two subgroups according to their level of Chinese exposure (High
Exposure N=5, Low Exposure N=3). Finally, the children in the Bilingual group had
the most Chinese language exposure, both from their families and Chinese schools.
Not all children in this group were strictly bilingual, but all were reported to have
Chinese language skills appropriate for second or later generation immigrants at their
age group by parents and teachers.
All three groups were controlled for chronological age but not gender. The Bilingual
group had the highest age mean, however, a one way ANOVA showed no significant
age difference between the three groups (F (2, 24)= 2.749, p=.084). Moreover, the
Monolingual and Bilingual groups included children of both genders, while there
were only females in the Adoption group. This was due to the adoption situation
specific to China. Among the Chinese children internationally adopted under one year
of age, over 90% are female (INS Immigration Statistics, 2006).
Recruitment Methods
Different recruitment methods were employed for the three groups. The 10 children in
the Monolingual group were attending a day care facility located in and organised by
the Department of Psychology in the University of Stirling at the time of testing.
Consents had been obtained prior to the research as part of the day care arrangement
between guardians and the Department. Testing was carried out also in the day care
facility.

Half of the 8 children in the Adoption group were directly recruited from a monthly
playgroup (Panda Club) organised by the Central Scotland International Adoption
Support Group, which was founded and organised by the adoption parents in that
area. The experimenter had been the hostess and teacher for the Panda Club for more
than two years. These children were included as part of convenient sampling to
ensure a relatively consistent level of Chinese exposure in terms of source and
intensity. The experimenter made contact with the parents of one more child via one
of the families in the Panda Club. Internet advertising was also used in the
recruitment procedure, which brought two more families into contact with the
experimenter. The visits, as well as the testing, occurred in the communities where the
families were residing, mostly family houses.
The geographic distribution of this group covered Forth Valley, Lothian, Dunfermline
and the east coast of Scotland, as well as Devon. The family in Devon had been living
in Stirling and the adopted child had spent more than a year there before moving.
Therefore, the sample was representative of the China adoption scenario in Scotland.
The recruitment for the Bilingual group was not as straightforward. Several methods
were employed in this case, including internet advertising. However, the most
successful route was via the two largest Mandarin schools in Scotland, the Glasgow
Chinese School and Alba Cathay Chinese School, Edinburgh, since 8 out of 9
children in this group were pupils from the two schools. The Chinese pupils were
largely from immigrant families and they attended Chinese classes every Saturday
morning during term times. Consents had been obtained from parents individually
before morning classes started. An experimenter carried out the testing in a quiet

corner in the classrooms. The only exception was a Cantonese-speaking family in
Kirkcaldy, which was introduced to the experimenter by one of the participating
families.
Materials
The research involved two types of assessments: English language assessment and
Theory of Mind tasks.
The Test for Early Language Development-3 (TELD-3) was used to assess children’s
English abilities in both receptive and expressive language, across all three groups.
Theory of Mind tasks consisted three parts, unexpected transfer task, content task and
Droodle task. Unexpected transfer task required a toy shoe and a cardboard box. The
Content task required a sunglasses box and a toy car. Finally two different black and
white drawings and another piece of paper with two 3cm holes were needed for the
Droodle task (Appendix 1). In all three parts, a human doll was introduced to act as a
research assistant. The doll, the shoe, the car and the cardboard box were all provided
in the TELD-3 kit.
Tests and Measures
All children were recorded in terms of their date of birth, gender and testing dates.
Parents of children in the Adoption group were also asked to complete an information
sheet concerning the adoption date and answer a few questions assessing the child’s
Chinese learning. (Appendix 2)
The Test for Early Language Development, Version Three (TELD-3, 1999) is the
revised product of TELD-1 (Hresko, Reid & Hammill, 1981) and TELD-2 (Hresko,

Reid & Hammill, 1991). A complete TELD-3 kit includes an Examiner’s Manual,
Picture Book, 25 Profile/Examiner Record Booklets Form A, 25 Profile/Examiner
Record Booklets, Form B and manipulatives, all in a study storage box. The test was
built to assess the English spoken language ability of children aged between 2 years
and 7 years 11 months.
The administration of TELD-3 involves two subtests: a Receptive Language subtest
and an Expressive language subtest. The raw scores of these two subtests can then be
interpreted into standardised quotients (with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation
of 15) and percentiles. Age equivalent scores are also reported for the subtests.
Further interpretation is made available for clinical use as well.
TELD-3 was examined extensively for its reliability and validity. The test items were
also designed and considered against bias relative to gender, disability, racial,
socioeconomic and geographic factors. These features of TELD-3 satisfied the need
of the reported research which has strong ethnical and geographic variables. Most
importantly, the standardised quotients are ‘age-appropriate’. This made it possible to
compare the language skills of groups with children of different ages.
Procedure
Before the actual testing, all children were encouraged to spend some time with the
experimenter. The purpose of this was to help the experimenter build rapport with the
participating child, thus the task performance would not be affected by the presence
of the experimenter as a stranger (Sherrod & Cohen, 1976). Parents of the children in
the Adoption group were also asked to complete the information sheet in this session.
However, the amount of time spent on rapport building and the interval between

rapport building and actual testing varied between groups and was mostly decided
upon parents’ suggestion. In the rapport-building session with the Monolingual group,
the experimenter took part in a half-day outdoor activity with all children in the play
group. The actual testing occurred during the third week after the rapport-building
session. Children in the Adoption group were mostly seen individually and there was
only one case where two children were in the same rapport-building session. The time
scheme for this group was roughly the same with the Monolingual group, where
testing was arranged two weeks after the rapport-building session. Exceptions
occurred in cases where three children in the Adoption group were already very
familiar with the experimenter. Thus testing was then carried out once the child was
settled and happy to participate. Finally, the children in the Bilingual group were
given approximately 10 minutes each just before the testing, due to limited student
availability in schools. However, the testing only proceeded when both experimenter
and the guardian (parent or teacher) agreed that the child was relaxed and comfortable
to participate. The testing procedure was identical for all three groups and it is worth
noting that only English was used to communicate during the testing. All children
were tested individually in a location which the guardian had suggested as being
‘quiet and familiar’ for the child. The presence of a guardian was determined by the
request of the child, while the guardian was asked not to offer help on tasks.
In the Theory of Mind tasks, the experimenter sat down at a desk facing the child. All
materials not used in the current task were placed underneath the desk and out of the
visual field of the child to avoid unnecessary distraction. If a guardian was present,
he/she would be asked to sit beside and slightly behind the child. The order of three

tasks involved was always the unexpected transfer task, then the content task and
finally the Droodle task. A full transcript of the Theory of Mind t