[The linguistic marks in the theory of mind: intersubjectivity and enunciation in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder].
BACKGROUND
The tests that are commonly used to analyse whether a subject has developed mentalistic and intersubjective capacities (theory of mind) are restricted to tasks that assess comprehension, without taking into account the active, expressive marks of those capacities.


METHODS
Taking Benveniste's pragmatic theory of enunciation as our framework, we analyse texts written by children who have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in order to confirm the presence of formal marks of enunciation. We distinguish between the explicit marks in a text (verb or noun phrases that refer to mental states and also diction) and marks embedded within the text (dialogues, allusions to other texts, textual polyphony). The corpus of data used for this analysis consisted of 170 narrative and argumentative texts written by children aged between 9 and 11 years, of whom those who had been diagnosed as suffering from combined-type ADHD constituted a subgroup.


CONCLUSIONS
The theory of enunciation provides a suitable framework for studying the expressive, active manifestation of the intersubjective capacity of children.
Gallardo-Paúls
B
B
Lingüística General, Facultad de Filología, Traducción y Comunicación, Universitatde València, Valencia, España. beatriz.gallardo@uv.es
D001289:Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity / Q000150:complications*; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007806:Language Disorders / Q000209:etiology*; D008297:Male