Reading Minds: The Relation Between Children’s Mental State Knowledge and Their Metaknowledge About Reading

Abstract

The relation between children's mental state knowledge and metaknowledge about reading was examined in 2 studies. In Study 1, 196 children (mean age = 9 years) were tested for verbal ability (VA), metaknowledge about reading, and mental state words in a story task. In Study 2, the results of Study 1 were extended by using a cross-lagged design and by investigating older children (N = 71, mean ages = 10 years at Time 1 and 11 years at Time 2) for mental state knowledge, metaknowledge about reading, and VA. Results showed a significant relation between early cognitive (but not emotion) mental state knowledge and later metaknowledge about reading, controlling for VA. Results suggest close links between different aspects of children's knowledge about the mind.

The origins of children’s metamemory: The role of theory of mind

“…Although Lecce, Zocchi, Pagnin, Palladino, and Taumoepeau (2010) work focused on children older than those considered in the current study, and on metacognition applied to a reading comprehension task, we expected to find similar results with respect to DM. There are three main reasons for expecting DM to be more closely related to cognitive ToM than to affective ToM.…”

“…This research, conducted by Lecce and colleagues (Lecce, Zocchi, Pagnin, Palladino, & Taumoepeau, 2010), involved a sample of Italian primary school children. It focused on children's metaknowledge about reading comprehension and showed that whereas cognitive ToM (indexed by cognitive mental state language and the Strange Stories task) was significantly associated with metaknowledge about reading, affective ToM (indexed by emotion mental state language and the Test of Emotion Comprehension) was not.…”

Predicting school achievement from early theory of mind: Differential effects on achievement tests and teacher ratings

“…Thus, metacognitive knowledge could mediate between children's theory of mind and academic performance. Longitudinal studies demonstrated that children's theory of mind is predictive for children's metacomprehension (Lecce, Zocchi, Pagnin, Palladino, & Taumoepeau, 2010) and metamemory (Ebert, 2011;Lecce, Demicheli, Zocchi, & Palladino, 2015;Lockl & Schneider, 2007a) which holds true even if earlier scores on metamemory were controlled for (Ebert, 2015). In a similar vein, another possible mechanism suggesting an association between theory of mind and academic achievement could be children's beliefs about learning.…”

Does sensitivity to criticism mediate the relationship between theory of mind and academic achievement?

“…For example, according to Kuhn (2000), meta-knowing includes both theory of mind and metacognition; the former encompasses declarative knowledge, whereas the latter encompasses procedural knowledge. Supporting this proposal, longitudinal studies demonstrate predictive links between false belief understanding and children's later metamemory (Lockl & Schneider, 2007) and metacomprehension (Lecce, Zocchi, Pagnin, Palladino, & Taumoepeau, 2010).…”