(Co-)Constructing a theory of mind: From language or through language?

Abstract

There is a large body of empirical work that has investigated the relationship between parents' child-directed speech and their children's Theory of Mind development. That such a relationship should exist is well motivated from both Theory Theory and Socio-Cultural (SC) perspectives. Despite this general convergence, we argue that theoretical differences between the two perspectives suggests nuanced differences in the expected outcomes of the empirical work. Further, the different ontological commitments of the two approaches have (mis)guided the design, coding, and analysis of existing research and imply different future directions. We discuss five areas of extant research that can be extended and diversified most coherently by adopting a SC framework. Keywords Theory of mind • Folk psychology • Socio-cultural theory • Theory theory • Mental state talk We seek to examine the role that social experience plays in the development of children's ability to reason about the mental perspectives of self and others. This ability, from here on referred to as theory of mind (ToM), is widely recognized as a sociocognitive ability that benefits from children's experience of perspectivally rich talk in meaningful social interaction contexts (e.g., conversations, storytelling, pretend play). One indicator of perspectivally rich talk is the use of mental state terms that describe mental processes that are not directly observable. Two approaches (i.e., theory theory and socio-cultural theory) underscore the importance of child-directed mental state language in theory of mind development. While evidence for the relationship between the richness of child-directed mental state talk and theory of mind has been taken to B Hande Ilgaz

Mother‐child talk about mental states: The what, who, and how of conversations about the mind

“…Given our detailed analysis of MST, the current study was not powered to examine these individual differences. As Ilgaz and Allen (2020) pointed out, the MST literature often does not fully investigate all qualities of MST in relation to theory of mind; however, this can be problematic given the typical sample sizes of MST work. The results of this study provide the mechanisms by which parents engage children in MST and point to future possibilities with targeted MST research questions (e.g., does open‐ended cognitive talk both elicit children's MST and predict their theory of mind performance?).…”

“…Given our detailed analysis of MST, the current study was not powered to examine these individual differences. As Ilgaz and Allen (2020) Guajardo et al, 2013). Talk that encourages children to provide their own explanations may promote theory of mind understanding because it encourages children to make sense of behavior and its antecedents.…”

“…We also expect that these are the categories appearing most frequently in mothers’ speech to children, which is important for sequential analysis, as low joint frequencies are problematic. We examined modulations of assertion, which denotes speaker certainty (Ilgaz & Allen, 2020), separately from cognition (e.g., Ruffman et al., 2002; Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2008 ). We would expect that most of mothers’ speech in this category would focus on the self; thus, when examining the contingency between mental state category and referent (i.e., self, child, book), we might expect that modulations would often focus on the mother (Ilgaz & Allen, 2020) whereas other cognitive verbs such as think and know would focus on both the mother and child (Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2008).…”

“…Despite the foundational nature of conversational contingencies in social constructivist theory, this assumption is infrequently investigated. Assuming conversation is cooperative and involves both interlocutors (Ilgaz & Allen, 2020), it is surprising that researchers typically measure only parents’ input to children as a predictor of children's theory of mind (see meta‐analyses; Devine & Hughes, 2018; Tompkins et al., 2018 ). Unlike the majority of work on parents’ mental state talk (MST), the current study is not a study of MST as a predictor of individual differences in children's theory of mind.…”

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“…The study of the pragmatic aspects of language as they relate to ToM has either focused on the nature of the home literacy environment such as the frequency of storytelling practices or the different pragmatic uses of mental state language. It is important to note that research in this area is very limited, yet there is renewed interest in the best possible ways to investigate the proposed relation (Ilgaz & Allen, 2020;Ruffman, Puri, Galloway, Su, & Taumoepeau, 2018). Nevertheless, some preliminary data can be taken as impetus for further inquiry.…”