Deafness, Story Understanding, and Theory of Mind

Deafness, story understanding, and theory of mind.

The results of a number of studies indicate that prelingually deaf children raised in a spoken language environnent appear to have difficulty in understanding and retelling stories. Various explanations have been offered: story understanding may be impaired by lack of background knowledge and vocabulary; the lack of access to the phonology of spoken language may reduce the capacity of short-ter...

Insights into Theory of Mind from Deafness and Autism

This paper summarizes the results of 11 separate studies of deaf children’s performance on standard tests of false belief understanding, the results of which combine to show that deaf children from hearing families are likely to be delayed in acquiring a theory of mind. Indeed, these children generally perform no better than autistic individuals of similar mental age. Conversational and neurolo...

Understanding Norms Without a Theory of Mind

I argue that having a theory of mind requires having at least implicit knowledge of the norms of the community, and that an implicit understanding of the normative is what drives the development of a theory of mind. This conclusion is defended by two arguments. First I argue that a theory of mind likely did not develop in order to predict behavior, because before individuals can use proposition...

Simulation-Based Story Generation with a Theory of Mind

Emergent narrative refers to simulation-based systems in which stories emerge from the autonomous interactions among character agents and/or the human player. Despite its advantages in interactive games, emergent narrative attracts concern about whether complex narratives emerge from arbitrary interactions. This problem can be alleviated if the character agents act according to what a story sho...

Schizotypy, theory of mind and the understanding of irony