Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The purpose of this study is to examine Theory of Mind (ToM) in processing the Chinese implicit causality verbs. The Experiment identified the Chinese causal verbs of high tendency by using a bias decision task to the ToM paradigms (Reading the Mind in the Eyes test revised and YONI task) to explore the relationship among English proficiency, Theory of Mind, and causal verb processing. The main results are: Proficiency in both English and Chinese can affect one’s interpretation of the Chinese implicit causality/consequentiality. On the other hand, the affective ability of ToM is enhanced as the English proficiency increases due to the understanding of the implicit causes/effects of the same concept under the context of the different languages. The study suggests that Chinese-English have different processing mechanisms from the monolinguals for the judgment of the implicit causality verbs.