Language and Children's Understanding of Mental States

Abstract

Children progress through various landmarks in their understanding of mind and emotion. They eventually understand that people's actions, utterances, and emotions are determined by their beliefs. Although these insights emerge in all normal children, individual children vary in their rates of progress. Four lines of research indicate that language and conversation play a role in individual development: (a) Children with advanced language skills are better at mental-state understanding than those without advanced language skills, (b) deaf children born into nonsigning families lag in mental-state understanding, and (c) exposure to maternal conversation rich in references to mental states promotes mental-state understanding, as do (d) experimental language-based interventions. Debate centers on the mechanism by which language and conversation help children's understanding of mental states. Three competing interpretations are evaluated here: lexical enrichment (the child gains from acquiring a rich mental-state vocabulary), syntactic enrichment (the child gains from acquiring syntactic tools for embedding one thought in another), and pragmatic enrichment (the child gains from conversations in which varying perspectives on a given topic are articulated). Pragmatic enrichment emerges as the most promising candidate.

Theory of Mind: An Overview and Behavioral Perspective

“…Other studies show a positive correlation between the child's verbal environment and the occurrence of verbal behaviors said to reflect ToM (e.g., Dunn, Brown, Slomkowski, Tesla, & Youngblade, 1991;Hale & Tager-Flusberg, 2003;Harris, de Rosnay, & Pons, 2005;Ruffman, Slade, & Crowe, 2002). For example, gains in language have been shown to be a predictor of preschoolers' ToM performance (Astington & Jenkins, 1999), as has the style of maternal language used with very young children, especially about what others think, feel, or would do in a particular situation (Harris et al, 2005). One study found that mothers' mental state utterances (e.g., "I think it's a cat," "I don't know whether it's a dog," "I wonder what that is?…”

How do use and comprehension of mental-state language relate to theory of mind in middle childhood?

“…Data from previous studies on theory-of-mind development in children suggest that language plays a key role in acquiring an understanding of mental states (Astington, 2001;Harris, de Rosnay, & Pons, 2005;Hughes, 2011;Hughes, Marks, Ensor, & Lecce, 2010;Lohman & Tomasello, 2003;Milligan, Astington, & Dack, 2007;Ruffman, Slade, Rowlandson, Rumsey, & Garnham, 2003;Slade & Ruffman, 2005). It is through language that children participate in social interaction, conversational exchanges, pretend play, story-telling and other activities fostering their ability to link manifest actions and behaviors with mental states that are inaccessible to direct observation (Nelson, 2005).…”

»Sreća je kad tata i ja igramo nogomet« ili o dječjem izricanju emocija

“…Ulogom jezičnoga znanja u razumijevanju i izražavanju mentalnih stanja ciljano su se bavile brojne studije, a iz njihovih istraživanja proizlazi da su svi aspekti jezičnoga znanja - ponajviše leksičko znanje, sintaktičko znanje i semantičko znanje (Harris, de Rosnay, Pons, 2005;Pons i sur., 2003) te jezičnopragmatično znanje (Farina, Albanese, 2007) - usko povezani s razumijevanjem i izražavanjem emocija. Rad Eleonore Farine i Ottavie Albanese (2007) pokazuje da su dječje sintaktičke i leksičke sposobnosti pretkazivači razumijevanja emocija, ali da je jezičnopragmatična sposobnost zaključivanja jedini pretkazivač dječje sposobnosti usmjeravanja pozornosti na vlastite doživljaje, tj.…”