2004 Volume 45 Issue 4 Pages 269-275
In order to develop a screening test for early detection of communication problems in children, we analyzed the mind-reading ability from speech of 339 subjects (173 male and 166 female) using spoken phrases with positive or negative linguistic meanings uttered by a woman with positive and negative emotions. For 20 phrases, the subjects were required to judge linguistic valence in linguistic tasks and emotional valence in emotion tasks. In the emotion tasks, correctness scores significantly increased with age for ironic and jocular phrases which have inconsistent linguistic and emotional valences, and the scores of junior high school students did not reach the level of the adult subjects. These results suggest that the ability to understand a speaker's hidden but true intensions by separating and integrating linguistic and emotional valences develops slower than estimated by conventional theory-of-mind tests based on false belief tasks.
