Whitehouse, A.

At the present time, it is thought that the behaviours and symptoms of individuals with autism are a result of a deficit in theory of mind. Previous research has shown that language and the most commonly used test of theory of mind, the false-belief task, are inextricably linked. Individuals with autism require a much greater verbal ability to pass a false belief task than typically developing controls. Currently, research has focussed upon the syntactic aspects of language, in particular the complement structure, as means of relating communicative competence and the false belief task. This study examined children with autism's ability on the false belief task and three tasks considered precursors to false belief ability. Further language examinations sought to determine how language ability might be related to their performance. Three children with autism were compared along a verbal age continuum of 24 typically developing children. Each child completed standard belief, not belief, explicit false belief and false belief tasks in addition to a story generation. The children with autism's performance on the standard belief and not belief tasks were found to be alike to typically developing children of a similar verbal age, while their performance on the explicit false belief and false belief tasks were poor in comparison. A range of spontaneous sample measures examined each child's story generation. The results revealed that the measures representative of communicative processing at a higher cognitive level were comparably poorer than their typically developing verbal age-matched controls. The results challenge the current beliefs of the extent and nature of theory of mind deficit in individuals with autism and provide new evidence as to how language ability may be related to theory of mind development.