Abstract
The article examines the peculiarities of the semantic component of communication activity of preschoolers with developmental delay. We have determined that an emotional attitude to an interlocutor introduced into communicative actions, together with the understood meanings of created messages, means transition to the semantic level of communication. We have theoretically and experimentally substantiated that this semantic level presupposes that an interacting subject is able to express emotional attitudes towards partners, to interpret and understand their mental states, which contribute to an understanding of any event or socio-communicative situation. To study the semantic level (component) of communication activities, we examined implicit and explicit mentalization. Implicit mentalization included the respondents’ assessment of the mental properties of objects proposed as partners; recognition by them of emotions and mental causes of these emotions in socio-communicative situations. Explicit mentalization means the respondents’ ability to understand causes of behaviour based on knowledge of people’s mental states, the ability to predict other people’s behaviour based on knowledge of their own and others’ mental states, the ability to understand the moral and ethical aspects of the Other’s behaviour. We have determined experimentally that children with the mentally deficient type of communication activity are characterized by difficulties in communicative prediction, misunderstanding of the causes of behaviour, low level of implicit and explicit mentalization. Hence, these children often get into conflict situations due to misconceptions about the results of their own actions or the actions of others. The identified patterns of implicit and explicit mentalization will be the basis for the technology forming communicative activity, in particular its semantic component in preschoolers with developmental delay.