Using Words Related to Psychological - Internal States in Children with and without Autism

Park, Hyun Ok; Lee, So Hyun

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2001;6(2): 392-405.

Hyun Ok Park^` , and So Hyun Lee^`

박현옥(Hyun Ok Park)| 이소현(So Hyun Lee)

ABSTRACT

Under standing of children with autism of the physical world appear s to develop in line with their mental age. On the other hand, their social skills are severely impaired and this suggest s a deficient under standing of the social world. Beyond this, autistic children are unable to impute internal state to others. The purpose of this study was to compare the terms of psychological- internal state between the normal children and children with autism. Fifteen autistic children were compared with fifteen 15 normally developing children in narrating the 4 picture stories. The statistic of t- test was used for the analysis. The following result s were obtained: (1) In contrast to normal children, the children with autism used more causal and behavioral language (2) Significant differences were found in the number s of psychologicalinternal state language (3) Significant differences were found in the type of psychologicalinternal state language. This results conforms previous studies which tested the hypothesis of a specific deficit of a theory of mind in the children with autism.