Abstract
The study examines whether the early acquisition of the first and the second person pronouns, as well as the first and the second person verb forms in Czech language, is related to the ToM development. The deictic principle of the first and second person reference (1st person is always speaker, 2nd person addressee) is why it is interesting acquisitionaly. There are suggestions that children do not always grasp the correct principle of person reference at first (they use the 3rd person, make reversal errors, or use both the 1st and 2nd forms interchangeably, see e.g. Tanz,
2009). Through the deictic principle, it might be related to Theory of Mind. Theory of Mind is an ability to perceive people as subjective individuals and to imagine their perspective. For the acquisition of the 1st and 2nd person reference, children need to understand the perspective of the speaker. As measures of Theory of Mind, we are concerned with (1) mental state language (Marková - Smolík, 2014 analyzed this relation by means of parental reports), (2) visual perspective taking (Loveland, 1984 and Ricard et al., 1999 already showed a linkage between pronouns and this capacity in English children), (3) pretend play and (4) intention understanding (the last two were not yet examined in relation to the acquisition of pronouns). We expect positive correlation between scores in the tasks on personal pronouns and scores in the tasks on ToM, even if we account for the effect of the general language development. We are concerned with 30-months-old children who greatly vary in their use of personal pronouns. We adopted four tasks from the previous studies concerned with personal pronoun production and comprehension; three tasks focused on measures of Theory of Mind; two tests of lexical and grammatical comprehension; and a 15-minutes-long spontaneous speech sample which serves for the estimation of mean length of utterance and spontaneous use of mental state language and pronouns in our subjects.