A psycholinguistic study of the "Theory of mind" of Turkish bilingual children

Abstract

This article presents the results of a study with Turkish preschool bilingual children living in Berlin, Germany. The study was conducted with two groups of children between 4-6 years (18 in total) in kindergarten and aims to examine the extent to which the mother tongue (L1) and the second language (L2) are a factor in understanding the “theory of mind” (ToM). The children are offered the classical tests for “theory of mind”, as well as language tests related to the comprehension of interrogative sentences, containing a verb showing a mental state and comprehension and production of vocabulary in native Turkish and German as a second language for them. The results show that vocabulary is not an important factor, and mastery of interrogative sentences is the factor that helps to understand the “theory of mind”. The results obtained were analyzed statistically by means of the t-test.