Acquisition of mental state language in Spanish children: a longitudinal study of the relationship between the production of mental verbs and linguistic development

Abstract

The development of language indicating the emergence of thinking about the thoughts of self and others has been scarcely studied in Spanish-speaking children. For this reason, we studied the development of mental state language and various indicators of language development in 25 Spanish-speaking children assessed at 3, 3 1/2, 4, 4 1/2, and 5 years of age. We coded and categorized the 40,250 utterances children produced during the five time points, 1202 (3.01%) of which had mental terms. In this sample, mental state language in Spanish children developed with a similar timeline and patterns as described in English-speaking children. However, several findings were novel for studies of mental state language. The general indexes of syntactic development did not correlate with the production of mental terms. The Index of Lexical Diversity was associated with the frequency of references to verbs of desire. The results of regression analyses suggest that not only the development of subordinate sentences with complement is associated with genuine mental references to desires and beliefs, but the development of lexical skills as well.

The Development of Internal State Language during the Third Year of Life: A Longitudinal Parent Report Study

“…At 28 months, Anglo‐American children produced perceptual, volition/ability and physiological terms with the highest frequency, followed by emotional/affect and moral/obligation words; the production of cognition words lagged significantly behind. The early use of desire terms and the relatively late use of cognitive words paralleled findings on children's comprehension of mental states (Wellman & Liu, ) and have been confirmed in both English‐speaking and non‐English‐speaking populations (Ferres, ; Pascual, Aguado, Sotillo, & Masdeu, ; Shatz, Wellman, & Silber, ; Tardif & Wellman, ).…”

Belief Is Prior to Knowledge

“…There are studies which look at the use of mental state verbs in young children but, unfortunately, these researchers aren't pursuing the question of whether "know" is used earlier than "thinks" in mental state ascription. Indeed, these studies tend to group "know" and "think" together to make contrasts with terms expressing belief and those expressing other mental state concepts (see e.g., Pascual et al, 2008). So it seems that the evidence discussed by Nagel represents the primary studies which take up the task of sequencing the use of "know" and "think" in the acquisition of the mental state lexicon.…”

Concurrent relations between inhibitory control, vocabulary and internal state language in 18- and 24-month-old Italian-speaking infants

“…Recent years have seen a growing interest in research on early internal state language acquisition in children speaking different languages (Chiarella et al, 2012;Kristen et al, 2012;Pascual et al, 2008;Poulin-Dubois et al, 2009). The first goal of the present study was to document internal state language abilities in a sample of Italian-speaking children, using an Italian adaptation of the Internal State Language Questionnaire (Bretherton and Beeghly, 1982;PoulinDubois et al, 2009).…”

“…Research on how children talk about the mind highlights how their theory of mind becomes progressively explicit and observable through language, namely using internal state terms. The first three years of age are marked by important developmental stages in language acquisition (e.g., first words, vocabulary spurt, word combination), so that early internal state language may be affected by language competence (e.g., Pascual, Aguado, Sotillo, & Masdeu, 2008). Children begin early to label states of perception (e.g., see, hear, smell, cold, hot), physiology (e.g., hungry, thirsty, sleep, tired), emotion (e.g., happy, sad, mad), volition (e.g., want, wish) and cognition (e.g., know, think, pretend).…”