Children's Theories of Mind: Mental States and Social Understanding

Callanan, Maureen A.; Cervantes, Christi A.; Frye, Douglas; Moore, C. J.

doi:10.2307/1422971

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Because it is not obvious how to define chance levels in this situation, it is difficult to assess whether these proportions represent “high” levels of mental state responding. On this point, however, it is interesting to note that in a separate study of mental term use by parents in this sample, mental terms were found to account for only 2% of the parents’ total talk (Callanan, Cervantes, Capelli, & Moore, 1996). This small percentage suggests that parents are using mental terms somewhat selectively.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 78%

Metarepresentation in action: 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' developing theories of mind in parent–child conversations.

Sabbagh¹,

Callanan²

1998

Developmental Psychology

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Using a cross-sectional natural language database, the authors investigated the parent-child conversations of 36 three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds to explore 2 issues regarding the development of metarepresentation. First, children's uses of explicit contrastives (ECs)--utterances that explicitly contrast 2 differing mental states--were explored. Four-year-olds and, to a greater extent, 5-year-olds were found to reliably use ECs. Second, parents' responses to children's uses of "I don't know" and implicit contrastives (e.g., contradictions) were examined to determine whether parents took these opportunities to highlight the representational nature of mental states. All children regularly elicited mentalistic responses from their parents and, in some cases, these parental responses were positively related to children's production of mental talk. Findings are discussed in terms of how theory of mind development may be guided by scaffolding processes.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 78%