Author ORCID Identifier
Jill de Villiers: 0000-0002-2906-3537
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2026
Publication Title
Child Language Teaching and Therapy
Abstract
Complement clauses, such as Mary says that Santa exists, are complex linguistic structures that have been argued to help children grasp others’ beliefs when those beliefs do not align with reality. Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) tend to have difficulties with Theory of Mind (ToM), which might be helped by enhancing understanding of complements. The study investigates whether an ecological approach to training, using children's books containing false complement clauses, can improve false belief reasoning in children with ASD and typically developing (TD) children. The goal is to assess if structured dialogic reading at home, led by parents, improves children's understanding of complex syntax and also false beliefs. The study involved 26 French-speaking children, 14 with TD and 12 with ASD, aged between 34 and 121 months. The participants were screened based on their language comprehension and ToM abilities, ensuring they had not mastered complement clauses or FB reasoning. The children’s parents participated in a dyadic reading program over eight weeks, reading specially designed books which targeted either complement or relative clause structures. A cross-over design was used so that all children were read both of the books but in two orders. Children were tested before, at the change-over point, and after all the training using a series of false belief and complement tests. The experimental design allowed for comparison between the effects of complement training versus relative clause training on FB reasoning. It was hypothesized that improvement in false belief tasks would occur only after exposure to the book containing false complement clauses.
Results showed that both ASD and TD children showed significant progress in false belief tasks after reading the target book, but no improvement after reading the control book. Importantly, this improvement was consistent regardless of the child’s clinical status. The relative clause training did not produce similar effects, indicating a specific advantage of complement training for ToM development. Statistical analyses confirmed these findings, with significant improvements seen in false complements (p < .001) and false beliefs (p < .001) across the intervention. The findings align with previous studies that suggest false complement training boosts performance in false belief tasks.
In conclusion, training based on false complement clauses helps ToM in both ASD and TD children when parents guide the reading sessions. The study highlights the benefits of parent-led, home-based, ecological training of language.
Keywords
false belief reasoning, complements, relative clauses, training study, parent book reading, crossover design, autism
First Page
1
Last Page
21
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Rights
Licensed to Smith College and distributed CC-BY 4.0 under the Smith College Faculty Open Access Policy.
Version
Author's Accepted Manuscript
Recommended Citation
de Villiers, Jill and Durrleman, Stephanie, "Theory of Mind: Effects of Ecological Syntactic Training in Children with and without Autism" (2026). Linguistics: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/lng_facpubs/1