Abstract
This research examined the relationship between children’s development of Theory of Mind(TOM) and their understanding of Chinese mental verbs and complements. Sixty Chinese–speaking 4-year-old children accepted Tony’s nonverbal IQ test， general language test， complement-understanding tasks and TOM tasks. Results showed that children’s complement-understanding effectively predicted their performance on TOM tasks after controlling for SES， age， IQ score and general language comprehension， no matter the main verb was mental verb or not . These findings led to the conclusion that it is the complement structure but not the meaning of mental verbs contributing uniquely to the development of children ’s Theory of Mind . Some discussion and suggestions were proposed according to the findings of this research.