Verbal Communication Difficulties and Ability to Read Mind (Theory of Mind): A Comparative Study Between Autistic Children, Children with Down Syndrome, Children with Speech Disorders and Normal Children (Novels Magazine; Vol.6, No.1)

This study aimed to determine the nature of the relation between verbal communicative ability with its formal and functional aspects and the ability to read mind, and to search for a correlation between mind reading and the mental level in both its verbal and performance aspects, as well as searching for the existence of statistically significant differences between the five samples of the study.The study sample included 30 children of both sexes distributed into five groups, each includes six children between the ages of 5-10 years: (Autistic children, children with Down syndrome, children with formal difficulties, children with functional difficulties,normal children), and to achieve these Objectives the researcher used a test to assess mental reading and an analysis grid for verbal communication, , in addition to the verbal and visual intelligence test of Ejlal Muhammad Serri to assess the mental level .This study reached several results: a correlation between mental reading and verbal communicative ability in its formal and functional aspects, and between mind reading and the mental level in both its verbal and performance aspects, while it was found that there were no statistically significant differences between the samples of normal children, children with formal difficulties, children with functional difficulties, autistic children, and children with Down syndrome, while the differences were significant between samples of normal children, children with formal difficulties, children with functional difficulties and the two samples of autistic children, and children with Down syndrome.