영,유아의 마음 이론 발달에 관한 연구 = A Study on the Development of Theory of Mind of Young Children

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The purpose of the present study was to examine the theory of mind of 67 young children. The children were selected from 3 non-profit, play-oriented daycare centers. The age of the children ranged from 19 to 48 months. To examine children’s theory of mind, two instruments, the pretense-reality task and hide-and-seek play task, were utilized. A series of two-way ANOVA was performed to examine the significant age and sex differences in terms of the scores of the pretense-reality task and of the hide-and-seek play task. In addition, the test of Pearson’s correlation was implemented to identify the relationships between the scores of the two tasks. According to the results, some subjects below 2 years could perform the two theory-of-mind tasks and some of them obtained relatively high scores. The correlational analysis also demonstrated a significant relationship between the scores of the two theory of mind tasks. This study implies that theory of mind may appear even for children as young as 2 years old.