RESUMEN
Resumen Este trabajo presenta los resultados del estudio sobre habilidades mentalistas en niños preescolares argentinos. Su interés reside en la importancia que revisten los logros conceptuales en el desarrollo de la Teoría de la Mente y el método adecuado para medirlos, dada la escasez de estudios sobre el tema en el ámbito local. Con un diseño descriptivo transeccional se examinaron 105 niños (4 a 6 años de edad) con la Escala de Teoría de la Mente de Wellman y Liu (2004), compuesta por 7 tareas diferenciadas, adaptada al español rioplatense. Entre los resultados de este estudio se destaca que, al igual que los hallazgos reportados por los autores de la escala, los porcentajes de respuestas correctas aumentan con la edad cronológica y disminuyen de acuerdo a la complejidad de la tarea. La secuencia y la dificultad creciente de las tareas son consistentes, aunque tal como lo proponen Wellman y Liu es necesario limitar las siete tareas originalmente propuestas a cinco, para ajustarse a los requerimientos de un escalograma. Los porcentajes de respuestas correctas hallados son menores a los encontrados en la investigación original teniendo en cuenta, además, que no se incluyeron niños de 3 años. La escala resulta un instrumento adecuado en la medida que proporciona evidencia empírica de la complejidad de las habilidades involucradas, así como de su progresión, imposibles de ser aprehendidas a través de una tarea única, tal como sucede en las evaluaciones que incluyen solo tareas de falsa creencia.
Abstract This work introduces the results obtained in the study of mentalizing skills in pre-school Argentine children. Interest in this lies on the importance of conceptual achievements marking the normal development of the Theory of Mind (TM) and the appropriate way to measure them, and on the lack of studies on the subject in the region. The TM is understood as the capacity to infer emotions, beliefs and desires, and to use such inferences to predict and explain one's behavior as well as that of others. This theory has been studied thoroughly for the past 40 years due to its implications for communicative competence and social interaction, given that if a child fails to understand the relations between behavior and mental states, he or she will have difficulties understanding social situations in everyday life. Its assessment has changed based on how this theory has been conceptualized in connection with its birth and development. The initial conception, which considered it as a single capacity acquired once and for all, was replaced by a more gradualist approach. This enabled the enlargement of the notion of TM to a series of increasingly elaborate and flexible conceptual acquisitions formed throughout a child's psychological development. Based on the hypothesis that a series of mentalist achievements following a predictable sequence occur during a child's normal development, Wellman and Liu (2004) designed a scale which operationalizes the TM. The instrument, which was to be used with pre-school children, consisted of 7 tasks which examine various skills: 1. Diverse desires, 2. Diverse beliefs, 3. Knowledge access, 4. Contents false belief, 5. Explicit false belief, 6. Belief-emotion and 7. Real-aparent emotion. The aim of this paper is to present the results obtained with Wellman and Liu's TM Scale in pre-school children living in the city of La Plata, Province of Buenos Aires (Argentina), and to compare them against the results obtained by the authors. With a cross-sectional descriptive design, 105 children aged between 4 and 6 were tested using the TM Scale adapted to Rioplatense (River Plate) Spanish. Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI III) was also used in order to check intellectual level and exclude the protocols of the children who scored below 70 in the Total IQ. Among the results of this study, as well as the findings reported by the authors of the scale, it is noteworthy that the percentage of right answers increases with chronological age and decreases in relation to task complexity. The sequence and the increasing difficulty of the tasks are consistent, however, as proposed by Wellman & Liu, it is necessary to limit the original 7 tasks to 5, to conform with the requirements of a scalogram within the ages taken into consideration. The percentages of correct answers found in this study are lower than those found in the original investigation, taking into account, in addition, that 3 years old children were not included. The scale constitutes an adequate instrument in that it provides empirical proof of the complexity of the skills involved as well as of their progression, both of which are impossible to apprehend through a single task, as is the case of the assessments including only false belief tasks. All in all, the differences found in the performance of the participants included with respect to the original study require further research in not only cross-sectional but also longitudinal studies of clinical and non-clinical populations.
RESUMEN
En la escritura convencional de oraciones y de textos, las palabras están separadas por espacios en blanco. Sin embargo, en los inicios de la alfabetización suelen observarse hiposegmentaciones e hipersegmentaciones entre palabras. Las investigaciones sobre el tema son escasas, limitándose a registrar su aparición, sin llegar a establecer todos los tipos de uniones o separaciones. En función de ello, a partir de un diseño descriptivo transeccional correlacional, el propósito de este trabajo fue caracterizar el tipo y frecuencia de separaciones no convencionales entre palabras que aparecen durante el primer año de escolaridad en niños argentinos y mexicanos con expectativas de logro diferentes. En segundo lugar, examinar las posibles relaciones que guardan esas separaciones con el desempeño lector y el nivel de vocabulario. Para ello, se examinaron 30 niños argentinos y mexicanos que tenían entre 6 y 7 años de edad mediante pruebas de escritura, lectura y vocabulario. En el análisis lingüístico de las producciones infantiles se utilizó la noción gramatical de formante morfológico que posibilitó caracterizar la totalidad y distribución de las segmentaciones no convencionales. Los resultados más significativos aportan evidencia empírica de la presencia de tales segmentaciones en los niveles iniciales del aprendizaje y una distribución semejante del tipo de errores cometidos, independientemente de la nacionalidad y exigencias en la alfabetización. Se concluye, con las limitaciones del caso en razón del número de niños incluidos, que parecen constituir una etapa evolutiva, a ser considerada en futuras investigaciones y en estrategias de enseñanza de la escritura de oraciones y textos.
In conventional writing of sentences and texts, the words are separated by blank spaces. However, the beginnings of literacy often observed hypo-segmentations and hyper-segmentations between words. Hypo-segmentation occurs when adequate separation between words is missing, whereas hyper-segmentation takes place when a word is separated incorrectly and a space is inserted between two of its elements. Research on this topic is scarce and has registered the appearance of arbitrary joints and separations both in content and functional words, but has failed to account for all of the phenomena observed in children's writing. This paper has two aims: first of all, characterize the type and frequency of the unconventional separations between words written at the end of the first year of primary schooling in Mexican and Argentinian children, by reason of the different literacy modalities of both countries. The expectations prescribed in the curricula of both countries are different: Mexico expected children to learn to read and write words and sentences at the end of preschool. In Argentina those expectations are related to the first cycle of primary schooling. Regarding the teaching methodologies to which the children screened were exposed, although it is not possible to characterize them as exhaustive, since teachers often introduce different variants, they are predominantly phonic in the case of Mexico, and derived from the psychogenesis of the language written in the case of Argentina. Second, identifying the possible connection between these phenomena and variables as reading, writing and vocabulary performance range. Therefore, thirty Argentinian and Mexican children between six and seven years of age (mean age: six years and nine months) were examined through (both spontaneous and dictated) writing, reading and vocabulary tests. The notion of morphological formants was used to linguistic analysis of child productions; this allowed for the categorization of all the unconventional segmentations which came up. Among some of the results of this study, we would like that the proposed classification turned out to be extremely useful and even more adequate than other classifications in terms of word -function and word -content. Secondly, it should be pointed out that unconventional separations were more frequently observed in dictations. Thirdly, Mexican children obtained higher scores when reading words and pseudo-words, which demonstrate that they have better control of the alphabetic principle in comparison with the Argentinian ones. Fourthly, and in agreement with other research, hypo-segmentation frequency of appearance turned out to be higher than hyper-segmentation, both groups displaying similar characteristics. On the one hand, the average scores for the mistakes made failed to show any significant differences in terms of children's nationalities. On the other hand, even though such hypo-segmentations mostly appeared due to union of a lexical and a grammatical formant, in other cases only lexical or grammatical formants were joined, which proves once again how useful the categorization was. Finally, correlations with the levels of word reading and writing, reading comprehension and vocabulary range turned out to be low. In connection with this, with the limitations of the case number, it can be pointed out that wrong segmentation goes beyond the children's performance within such variables and seems to be an evolutive stage within the progressive control of reflection upon and conscious manipulation of lexical items. It would prove interesting to increase the study to one larger number of participants and made longitudinal studies, during the schooling process enabling to clear out the evolution of the phenomena examined throughout the schooling period. It should be pointed out that unconventional word separations are not always spotted at school and that their persistence, unless proper intervention strategies are used, may have subsequent repercussions on text production, which corresponds to more advanced schooling levels.