儿童阅读与心理理论间的关系

The relationship between children’s reading and theory of mind

阅读与心理理论(theory of mind, ToM)在儿童发展过程中都发挥着重要的作用,梳理文献发现两者可能存在双向促进作用。儿童通过与家长或老师的共享阅读,启动联合注意,使用心理状态术语进行对话,进一步根据社会想象力,模拟社会互动,从而促进儿童心理理论发展。另一方面,在阅读过程中,心理理论能够助力儿童从宏观的阅读观的建立、元认知阅读策略的使用、故事情境模型的构建,到微观具体的短语、句子、语篇和多文本的理解等能力的提高,这些证据揭示了心理理论可以从多方面促进儿童阅读能力的发展。进一步的神经生理证据发现,阅读和心理理论这两个过程的神经活动是有一定重叠的。由此推测,两者可能具备潜在的双向促进关系。未来需要更深入和长期的纵向追踪研究为两者的关系提供丰富的实证证据。此外,还应进行更多中国的低龄儿童的研究。随着科技的发展和线上课程的盛行,也应更多关注多媒体内容阅读对儿童心理理论的影响。

Reading and theory of mind(ToM) both play important roles in children’s development, and previous studies reveal that reading and ToM may have two-way promotion effects. On the one hand, shared reading with parents or teachers enables children to initiate joint attention. In this process, children and storytellers use a lot of terms of mental state to communicate with each other, and they can also construct an alternative social situation through social imagination and perspective-taking ability, which promotes the development of children’s ToM. On the other hand, ToM can help children to improve their abilities to establish a macro view of reading, use metacognitive reading strategies, construct story situation models,and even promote their micro ability to understand specific phrases, sentences, discourses and multi-text materials. The evidence reveals that ToM can promote the development of children’s reading ability in various aspects. Further neurophysiological evidence shows that the neural activity of reading and ToM partly overlapped. There may be a potential two-way promoting relationship between reading and ToM.Further in-depth and long-term longitudinal follow-up studies are needed to provide abundant empirical evidence for the relationship between reading and ToM. In addition, more research on younger children in China should be conducted. With the development of technology and the prevalence of online courses, more attention should be paid to the influence of multimedia content reading on children’s ToM.