Mothers'andFathers' Use of Internal State Talk with their Young Children

Abstract

The present study extends previous results demonstrating a relation between maternal discourse and child social understanding to include paternal discourse. Emotion understanding (EU) and theory of mind (ToM) were considered as two distinctive aspects of social understanding. Participants were 106 children (54 boys and 52 girls) studied at 3.5 and 5 years. Discourse measures came from separate parent-child conversations during a picture-book task; measures of EU and ToM came from children's performance on social cognition tasks. Differences in parental talk translated into important differences in the influence of each parent on children's social-cognitive understanding. Mothers' references to emotion and emotion causal explanatory language predicted children's concurrent EU. Fathers' use of causal explanatory language referring to desires and emotions predicted children's concurrent and later ToM. These results highlight important differences between mothers and fathers in their use of internal state language and its impact on children's social-cognitive understanding.

Belief Is Prior to Knowledge

“…It's well established that linguistic input about the mind plays an important role in influencing theory of mind development (e.g., Bartch and Wellman, 1995;Brown, Donelan-McCall and Dunn, 1996;LaBounty, Wellman, Olson, Lagattuta and Liu, 2008;Turnbull, Carpendale and Racine, 2008). And as Wellman et al (2011) point out, parents of Chinese children speak more often of "knowledge" while parents of U.S. children speak more often of "thinking".…”

How Are Parental Reactions to Children’s Emotions Related to Their Theory of Mind Abilities?

“…Recent studies have explored individual and family characteristics that could be related to the development of children's understanding of emotions (ToM-emotions) (Fabes, Poulin, Eisenberg, & Madden-Derdich, 2002;Labounty, Wellman, Olson, Lagattuta, & Liu, 2008;McElwain, Halberstadt, & Volling, 2007). These studies have emphasized the importance of understanding a) how parents react to their children's emotions, b) how they talk about emotions, and c) how they express their emotions themselves, in order to explore how they contribute to their children's emotional competences.…”

The Role of Language Games in Children's Understanding of Mental States: A Training Study

“…Therefore, mental state talk is generally considered a precursor of children's theory-of-mind development (Dunn & Brown, 1993). Numerous studies 240 ORNAGHI, BROCKMEIER, AND GRAZZANI GAVAZZI have investigated different aspects of the relationship between children's use of mental state terms in spontaneous conversations with parents, siblings, and peers and their performance on theory-of-mind tasks (Hughes, Lecce, & Wilson, 2007;LaBounty, Wellman, Olson, Lagattuta, & Liu, 2008;Symons, 2004). All these studies support the conversational hypothesis (Hutto, 2007;Siegal, 1999Siegal, , 2008, which postulates that conversation promotes theory-of-mind development.…”