Mother–child conversation and social understanding in Pakistan

Abstract

Two studies are presented to examine whether and why 3–5-year-olds in Pakistan display limited social understanding. Study 1 tested 71 preschoolers on Lillard and Flavell’s (1992) test of desires, pretence and beliefs, plus two false belief tasks, and showed very limited understanding across these measures even though almost half were over 5 years old. Study 2 replicated this effect with 35 preschoolers, and also conducted home observations of mother–child interaction at two time points. It tested three competing explanations of the role of adult-conversation in the preschooler’s developing understanding of the mind: the quality of the caregiver’s references to mental states, the child’s grasp of mental state language in such conversations, and the connectedness of adult–child talk. These factors are usually highly correlated in Western cultures. In Pakistan, with a delay in the acquisition of social understanding skills, Study 2 showed that maternal and child references to mental states were rare (2% of maternal and 1% of child utterances). Analyses of the relationship between mother–child conversation and the children’s test performance suggested that the measures of social understanding were not predicted uniquely by the connectedness of talk within the dyad, or maternal use of mental state terms. However, the children’s concurrent (and to a lesser extent previous) use of mental state terms was related to their grasp of mental states. Thus, the data support previous analyses, which suggests that the child’s construction of mental state terms is more crucial in their grasp of the social world.

Effects of Bilingualism, Household Size and Siblings on Theory of Mind Development in Pakistani and British Children

“…Indeed, research has repeatedly indicated that amount of adults' mental state talk with children is positively related to their mentalizing development (Peterson & Slaughter, 2003;Ruffman et al, 2002Ruffman et al, , 2006. However, studies have revealed that adults from non-Western countries, including Pakistan, rarely engage in mental state talk with their children (Degotardi et al, 2022;Kong et al, 2023;Nawaz & Lewis, 2018;Vinden, 1996). Since the widest variation in number of family members was largely observed in the Pakistani sample, the increased adult interaction that Pakistani children would receive may be of 'lower quality' and therefore may not have benefitted the children's mentalizing development to such a degree.…”

“…Further, only two studies have investigated mentalizing development in Pakistan. Nawaz and Lewis (2018) found that Pakistani children developed ToM slower than Western children; however the study did not include a direct comparison group. Sireer (2017) similarly compared British, British-Pakistani and Pakistani children on their ToM and found that British children outperformed both other groups.…”

Mental State Talk: Assessment through Wordless Picture Story Book Reading

“…MST was assessed in naturalistic observation for father and mother (Jenkins et al, 2003), for mother (e.g. Brown, Donelan-McCall, & Dunn, 1996;Nawaz & Lewis, 2018), free play (Degotardi & Torr, 2007;Laranjo, Bernier, Meins, & Carlson, 2014;Slaughter, Peterson, & Carpenter, 2008)talking about past events in conversation (Lagattuta & Wellman, 2002;Laible, 2004;Laible & Thompson, 2000), meal preparation (Ensor & Hughes, 2008), mother to 'describe the child'(e.g. Lok & McMahon, 2006)or requesting a friend 'describe your friend (Hughes & Dunn, 1998) , pretend play (Dunn, Bretherton, & Munn, 1987;Hughes & Dunn, 1997) , wordless picture books and pictures (Baptista et al, 2017;Doan & Wang, 2010;Tarullo et al, 2016).…”

Association between Theory of Mind and Peer Problems

“…Similar is the case for Pakistani children. According to research done by Nawaz et al (2015), at the age of 5 years performance on theory of mind tasks is at chance, and these findings were replicated (Nawaz & Lewis, 2017). To fill this gap, one objective of the study is to explore at what age children in Pakistan achieve theory of mind development.…”