Children’s understanding of Aesop’s fables: relations to reading comprehension and theory of mind

Abstract

Two studies examined children’s developing understanding of Aesop’s fables in relation to reading comprehension and to theory of mind. Study 1 included 172 children from Junior Kindergarten through Grade 6 in a school-wide examination of the relation between reading comprehension skills and understanding of Aesop’s fables told orally. Study 2 examined the relation between theory of mind and fables understanding among 186 Junior (4-year-old) and Senior (5-year-old) Kindergarten children. Study 1 results showed a developmental progression in fables understanding with children’s responses becoming increasingly decontextualized as they were able to extract the life lesson. After general vocabulary, passage comprehension predicted fables understanding. Study 2 results showed a relation between young children’s theory of mind development and their understanding of fables. After general vocabulary, second-order theory of mind predicted children’s fables understanding. Findings point to the importance of developing mental state awareness in children’s ability to judge characters’ intentions and to understand the deeper message embedded in fables.

Peer Interaction Does Not Always Improve Children’s Mental State Talk Production in Oral Narratives. A Study in 6- to 10-Year-Old Italian Children

“…Narratives themselves are an important source of mental state talk (Dyer et al, 2000), thus children’s production of mental states could be influenced by their capacity to represent the protagonist’s intentions and subsequent actions (Pelletier and Beatty, 2015). Our resulted indicated that children’s production of mental state talk was unrelated to their competence in producing a narrative with a conventional structure, either in the individual or joint condition.…”

“…In primary school, children begin to tell or write stories with a basic and conventional macrostructure, which includes initiating events, several interlinked episodes, goal-directed actions, internal responses, and a final resolution (Stein and Glenn, 1982; Gelmini-Hornsby et al, 2011; Squires et al, 2014). Thus, children need advanced mental state talk to create a narrative centered around a protagonist’s intentions and subsequent actions (Pelletier and Beatty, 2015). The relationship between narrative competence and mental state talk develops in particular during primary school years.…”

“…Moreover, if the characters’ intentions are explicitly stated, primary school children are able to identify the characters’ mental states (Feathers, 2002). Pelletier and Beatty (2015) examined children’s developing understanding of Aesop’s fables from Kindergarten through Grade 6, and found that as children grow, they are increasingly able to understand fables through their mental state talk, beyond the contribution of general vocabulary. According to Dyer et al (2000) it is possible that narratives themselves can be an important source of mental state information.…”

Mental State Talk Structure in Children’s Narratives: A Cluster Analysis

“…Narratives are generally based on a conventional macrostructure, which includes initiating events, several interlinked episodes, goaldirected actions, internal responses, and a final resolution; see story-grammar approach [23,24]. As such, children need an advanced ToM to implement mental state talk in their narratives and centre them around a protagonist's intentions and subsequent actions [25]. Narrative is also a form of reflective thinking, as it reveals people's understanding of their own and other people's mental states [1].…”

“…Although children reach advance level in both construct once in primary school, also at the kindergarten level children are able to understand narratives through their mental state talk [25], as a result of the high rates of mental state terms included in children's books [40], as well as joint reading practices [41]. However, mental state talk has traditionally being studied in two main ways, either in terms of the specific categories, originally proposed by Bretherton and Beeghly [7], or as an aggregated score.…”