Maternal Talk in Cognitive Development: Relations between Psychological Lexicon, Semantic Development, Empathy, and Temperament

Abstract

In this study, we investigated the relationship between mothers' psychological lexicon and children's cognitive and socio-emotive development as assessed through conceptual and semantic understanding tasks, in addition to the traditional tasks of theory of mind. Currently, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the frequency of mothers' mental state words used in mother-child picture-book reading is linked with children's theory of mind skills. Furthermore, mothers' use of cognitive terms is more strongly related to children's theory of mind performances than the mothers' references to other mental states, such as desires or emotions (Rollo and Buttiglieri, 2009). Current literature has established that early maternal input is related to later child mental state understanding; however it has not yet clarified which maternal terms are most useful for the socio-emotional and cognitive development of the child, and which aspect of the cognitive development benefits from the mother-child interaction. The present study addresses this issue and focuses on the relationship between mothers' mental state talk and children's behavior in conceptual and semantic tasks, and in a theory of mind task. In this study fifty pairs consisting of mothers and their 3 to 6-year-old children participated in two sessions: (1) The mothers read a picture book to their children. To assess the maternal psychological lexicon, their narrative was codified according to the categories of mental state references used in literature: perceptual, emotional, volitional, cognitive, moral, and communicative. (2) After a few days, the conceptual and semantic skills of the children (tasks of contextualization and classification, memory, and definition of words) and their psychological lexicon were assessed. The results suggest close links between the frequency and variety of mothers' mental state words and some semantic and conceptual skills of children.

The Construction of Self in Relationships: Narratives and References to Mental States during Picture-Book Reading Interactions between Mothers and Children

“…Although the existence of a relation between these two domains has been disputed ( Tager-Flusberg and Sullivan, 1995 ; Charman and Shmueli-Goetz, 1998 ; Meins et al, 2006 ; Longobardi et al, 2016b ), the spontaneous production of mental state language (MSL: a specific type of language including perceptual, physiological, emotional, cognitive and moral terms) has been shown to forerun and predict the acquisition of ToM and, more generally, the emergence of meta-representational awareness ( Beeghly et al, 1986 ; Bartsch and Wellman, 1995 ). In agreement, significant positive associations between ToM and MSL have been reported by studies examining the behavior of preschool children in a variety of interactive contexts (e.g., book reading; Dunn et al, 1991 ; Hughes and Dunn, 1998 ; Rollo and Sulla, 2016 ).…”

How Could Children’s Storybooks Promote Empathy? A Conceptual Framework Based on Developmental Psychology and Literary Theory

“…During shared book-reading, parents ask their children, for example, how they think the story protagonists feel, why the character might have acted in a certain way or what the character might think will happen on the next page. Mothers use various emotional words (to enjoy, to be afraid) and their own empathy levels are linked to the amount of ability states (e.g., ‘you can do it’) that they refer to during book sharing (Rollo and Sulla, 2016). Children whose mothers used cognitive verbs such as think, believe, remember, know or understand, during book-reading showed higher understanding of mental states after the book reading session (Adrián et al, 2007).…”

Mothers’ views on shared reading with their two-year olds using printed and electronic texts: Purpose, confidence and practice

“…Findings from this extensive body of research have resulted in the identification of key themes, which have highlighted the purported purposes and affordances of engaging in this social practice with children. Such themes include improvement in children’s vocabulary (Mol et al., 2008), cognitive understandings and oral language proficiency (Cheng and Tsai, 2014; Mol and Bus, 2011), knowledge of story, concepts about print and literary register (Phillips et al., 2008), phonemic awareness (Bus et al., 1995; Deckner et al., 2006), the development of social and emotional knowledge (Rollo and Sulla, 2016; Taumoepeau and Ruffman, 2006) and supporting the value of reading that will result in positive long-term outcomes (Melhuish et al., 2008).…”