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

Abstract

Joint narratives are a mean through which children develop and practice their Theory of Mind (ToM), thus they represent an ideal means to explore children’s use and development of mental state talk. However, creating a learning environment for storytelling based on peer interaction, does not necessarily mean that students will automatically exploit it by engaging in productive collaboration, thus it is important to explore under what conditions peer interaction promotes children’s ToM. This study extends our understanding of social aspects of ToM, focusing on the effect of joint narratives on school-age children’s mental state talk. Fifty-six Italian primary school children participated in the study (19 females and 37 males). Children created a story in two different experimental conditions (individually and with a partner randomly assigned). Each story told by the children, as well as their dialogs were recorded and transcribed. Transcriptions of narratives were coded in terms of text quality and mental state talk, whereas transcriptions of dialogs were coded in terms of quality of interaction. The results from this study confirmed that peer interaction does not always improve children’s mental state talk performances in oral narratives, but certain conditions need to be satisfied. Peer interaction was more effective on mental state talk with lower individual levels and productive interactions, particularly in terms of capacity to regulate the interactions. When children were able to focus on the interaction, as well as the product, they were also exposed to each other’s reasoning behind their viewpoint. This level of intersubjectivity, in turn, allowed them to take more in consideration the contribution of mental states to the narrative.

The influence of narrative competence on mental state talk in kindergarten and primary school children

“…Storytelling has been consensually included among the various methods developed to measure children's narrative skills (Ketelaars, Jansonius, Cuperus, & Verhoeven, ). Individual storytelling is a typical daily school activity, making it an ecologically valid method to explore narrative competence and MST (Pinto et al ., ). Moreover, this task has been found to be relatively stable across the last year of kindergarten in assessing narrative competence (Pinto et al ., ).…”

“…In kindergarten, narratives are considered an emergent literacy skill, as an antecedent of future formal literacy skills (Whitehurst & Lonigan, ); in early primary school, teachers’ focus is on written narratives and the mastery of coding and decoding skills, which could cause an underperformance in narrative competence (Pinto et al ., ); in late primary school, instrumental coding and decoding skills are considered mastered by children, and teachers’ efforts focus more directly on narrative quality. For instance, past studies have suggested that narrative competence might be associated with MST in kindergarten years (Pinto et al ., ), but not in primary school (Pinto et al ., ).…”

“…() used a narrative task to demonstrate that children's MST is influenced by the narrative context in which the story has been told to them, whether face to face (contextualized condition) or over the phone (decontextualized condition). Pinto, Tarchi, and Bigozzi () investigated MST in primary school children's narratives in two conditions: individual versus joint storytelling. They also included a narrative competence measure to control for potentially confounding effects and found no correlation with MST.…”

“…The two studies conducted by Pinto et al . (, , ) investigated kindergarten and primary school children separately and with two different research designs, whereas in this study both age groups are included and given the same task. Moreover, prior studies have demonstrated that the structural component plays a pivotal role in narrative competence development (Pinto, Tarchi, & Accorti Gamannossi, ).…”

Contribution of oral narrative textual competence and spelling skills to written narrative textual competence in bilingual language-minority children and monolingual peers

“…In studying children's written narrative textual competence, it is interesting to distinguish which factors are sustained in the early or late phase of learning to write in primary school, because the characteristics of orthography may exert a different role on novice or more expert writers and monolingual or BLM children. Previous longitudinal studies on the transition from preschool to formalized education (e.g., Pinto et al, 2015Pinto et al, , 2016 indicate that Italian preschool children's oral narrative textual competence influences their later written narrative competence in first and second grades via a mediational effect of orthographic competence. Instead, there has been little research on how L2 spelling skills contribute to L2 written narrative textual competence in BLM children acquiring two orthographically distant languages: L1-Chinese (non-alphabet) and L2-Italian (alphabet and transparent orthography).…”