Role-Taking Skills in Normal Achieving and Learning Disabled Children

This study investigated role-taking skills in normal achieving and learning disabled children. The children looked at three cartoon series, in each of which a main character was portrayed as being caught up in a chain of events resulting in respective states of anger or fear or sadness. Additionally, in each of them, a bystander was introduced who witnessed the main character's psychological state without the knowledge of the prior context of the events. Each child told the stories from the viewpoints of the main characters and of the bystanders. Only the bystanders' stories were scored for egocentrism. The extent to which subjects could take a perspective which was unclouded by contextual knowledge known only to themselves was thus measured. The results showed that learning disabled children were much less able to adopt an alternative viewpoint than their normal counterparts. Moreover, within the group of learning disabled children, females were substantially more egocentric than males. The results enhanced understanding of previous findings of social problems in learning disabled children, and underscored the need for training learning disabled children in social skills.