Abstract
Socio-cognitive competence acquired through childhood is fundamental to social interaction and the future development in general. Nonetheless, any experimental research of Czech Deaf children's socio-cognitive skills is still an ignored area.
Our research question is: What is socio-cognitive competence of Czech Deaf children - both Czech Sign Language (CzSL) users and spoken Czech language users? Thus, we have used the Theory of Mind Test Battery (ToMTB, Hutchins & Prelock, 2014) and have adapted it to CzSL and spoken Czech (Hudakova & Filippova, 2017) to test Czech children. Overall 94 children aged 5-10 were tested up to this day: 35 Deaf-CzSL users, 24 Deaf-spoken Czech users and 35 hearing children, developing typically.
Preliminary results revealed that most of Deaf children (both CzSL users and spoken Czech users) achieved lower score compared to their hearing peers. We are convinced, this delay is not a consequence of deafness per se.
It is necessary to further study why Czech Deaf children achieved lower score in ToMTB. Increase of number of tested children, detail analysis and interpretation of collected data (including the circumstances of the language acquisition) are desirable.
Various influences and factors should be verified in the next phases of our study. A lack of exposure to conversation about mental states (i.e., emotions, desires, beliefs, knowledge, intents, etc.) could be one of them.