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

Abstract

Research on parents' mental state talk (MST) and children's social understanding is typically situated within a social constructivist approach, which asserts that parent-child conversations around mental states promotes children's social understanding. However, prior research has provided a limited view of children's participation in these exchanges or the interaction among qualities of MST. This study examined 67 mothers' MST while narrating a wordless book with their preschoolers (M age = 4.51 years) and children's subsequent responses; children were 80% White and 49% female.We coded mothers' MST for three qualities: (1) category (e.g., cognition), (2) referent (e.g., child), and (3) utterance function (e.g., open-ended question). Using sequential analysis, we hypothesized that children would respond to mothers' mental state input with MST or connected talk. We also examined relations among mothers' mental state category and referent/function. Examining over 1700 utterance pairs, there was considerable matching between mother's and children's MST within categories, children responded in a connected way when MST focused on the child or cognition, and children tended to respond to open-ended questions and closed questions, but not comments, about mental states.This study provides a novel method for analyzing parentchild MST, suggests that particular qualities of mothers' MST tend to co-occur, and suggests that particular qualities of mental states are especially likely to engage children in MST.

Metacognitive verbs do not show a cross-language gap: An investigation of metacognitive and concrete verbs in bilingual children

“…This may suggest that general linguistic experience (as indicated by CE) is less important for the acquisition metacognitive verbs than the mentalistic input. This is in agreement with previous findings showing that metacognitive words are best learned through interaction rich in references to mental states (Adrián et al, 2007; Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2008; Tompkins et al, 2021). Interestingly, we found that parental input – rich in metacognitive verbs – might affect children’s comprehension of metacognitive verbs in the language used with parents, but not in the other languages, although children’s comprehension of metacognitive verbs in Polish and English were positively correlated.…”

“…Language exposure is directly linked to concrete vocabulary development in bilingual children (Elin Thordardottir, 2011; Hoff et al, 2012). Its impact on metacognitive vocabulary in bilinguals has not been investigated so far, but exposure to references to mental states has been identified as crucial for metacognitive vocabulary acquisition (e.g., Tompkins et al, 2021).…”

“…Jakubowska et al (2018) found that mental utterances (i.e., sentences containing a reference to a mental state) constituted on average 21% of all utterances in parental stories told to 4-year-olds, of which 14% were simple utterances (e.g., ‘They didn’t know that someone was coming’), and only 7% were mental clarifications (e.g., ‘He thought that he would climb very fast and he would eat that bird’). However, these relatively infrequent maternal clarifications, especially when addressing the child’s mental states, serve as a scaffolding for children’s understanding and use of mental state vocabulary (Tompkins et al, 2021). Adrián et al (2007) found that mother’s use of metacognitive terms during picture-book reading, though constituted only up to 1.2% of overall mothers’ talk, predicted the 3- to 6–year-olds’ understanding of mental states.…”

Early childhood educators' mental state language and children's theory of mind in the preschool setting

“…Another possibility is that our study did not measure specific conversational features of educators' MSL that may be associated with child ToM understanding or propensity to engage with MSL concepts either at a group or individual level. Indeed, a recent investigation of maternal conversational dynamics indicated that when mothers embed MSL in open‐ended questions or use MSL in reference to their child, that children tended to respond with MSL (Tompkins et al, 2022). Similarly, Taumoepeau et al (2019) found that New Zealand mothers' references to their children's mental states were associated with child ToM.…”

Social cognition in the dyad: how peer play partners influence children's use of mental state talk

“…Findings from across the literature suggest that children's use of MST in dyadic contexts is strongly influenced by the behaviour of their interactional partner. For example, there are significant associations between maternal MST and the frequency of 4-year-old children's own references to mental states (Ruffman et al, 2002) as well as within-dyad connections concerning the type of mental state references made (Tompkins et al, 2022). This effect has also been observed specifically in peer dyads; for example, Hughes and Dunn (1997) found that the frequency of children's mental state references during play was as strongly correlated with their peer partner's use of MST as it was with their own verbal ability.…”