Teachers’ Language in Interactions: An Exploratory Examination of Mental State Talk in Early Childhood Education Classrooms

King, Elizabeth; Paro, Karen La

doi:10.1080/10409289.2015.989029

Cited by 30 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…The relation with mind-mindedness, however, is less clear in empirical research. No relation has been found between caregivers' work experience and mind-mindedness by Colonnesi et al (2017), whereas King and La Paro (2015) have found that caregivers with less work experience used more mental-state talk than caregivers with more work experience. The association between work experience and process quality, including caregivers' mind-mindedness, needs further empirical study.…”

Section: The Childcare Contextmentioning

confidence: 92%

Caregiver’s Mind-Mindedness in Early Center-based Childcare

Helmerhorst

Colonnesi

Fukkink

2019

Early Education and Development

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Recent studies suggest that mind-mindedness is an important element of caregiver-child interactions in family and childcare context. This study investigated caregivers' mind-mindedness in a nationally representative Dutch sample and its relation with structural quality factors (i.e., group size, caregivers' education and work experience, group type, and situation) and caregivers' interactive skills. Participants were 99 caregivers recruited in 50 childcare centers. Mind-mindedness was assessed with observations during free-play and lunch situations in infant, preschool, and mixed-age groups (0-4-year-olds). Caregivers' appropriate and nonattuned mindrelated comments were coded as individual (over/toward one child) or group related (over or toward more than one child). Caregivers' interactive skills were assessed using the Caregiver Interaction Profile (CIP) scales. Research Findings: Caregivers generally refer to children's desires, thoughts, and emotions in about 10% of their verbal interactions, with a low incidence rate of nonattuned comments (< 1%). Mind-mindedness was found to be significantly associated with structural quality characteristics and caregivers' interactive skills. Caregivers with greater interactive skills produced fewer individual and more group appropriate mind-minded comments in mixed-age groups. Practice or Policy: We discuss the relevance of mind-minded comments at individual and group level for the future study of mental-state talk in early childhood education and care. Mind-mindedness refers to the caregiver's ability to view and treat the child as an agent with independent thoughts and feelings (Meins, 2013). Mind-mindedness is the caregivers' propensity to be attuned to the child's mental states, such as thoughts, desires, emotions, and intentions (Meins, 2013) and is a measure of the quality of caregiver-child interactions (Barreto, Fearon, Osório, Meins, & Martins, 2016). A large majority of studies explored this construct in mothers, findings that maternal mind-mindedness is positively associated with maternal sensitivity (e.g., a caregivers' ability to appropriately and promptly interpret and respond to children's signals and emotional needs). Furthermore, parents' mindmindedness is found to be associated with child secure attachment (

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Section: The Childcare Contextmentioning

confidence: 92%

Caregiver’s Mind-Mindedness in Early Center-based Childcare

Helmerhorst

Colonnesi

Fukkink

2019

Early Education and Development

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“…A coding system was developed to record eight types of mental state references from the transcripts using an event-based (only relevant mental state references were coded), mutually exclusive (each relevant word/phrase was coded into only one category) coding system; only five types are used in the current study (see Table 1). The system was developed to integrate the methods used and specific content recorded by Garner and Dunsmore (2011); King and Paro (2015); Meins, Fernyhough, Fradley, and Tuckey (2001); Osório, Meins, Martins, Martins, and Soares (2012); and Ruffman, Slade, and Crowe (2002). As suggested by LaBounty and colleagues (2008), the complicated contexts in which causal talk was used in the contexts of emotion, physiological states, desire, and cognition were not coded as regular causal talk, but coded into one of the other categories.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

U.S. and Chilean Mothers’ Use of Mental References With Infant Girls and Boys: Comparison of Maternal Practices in Gender Socialization via Language in Two Countries

Chang

Farkas

Vilca

et al. 2017

Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology

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Variability in parents’ socialization of gender across countries has been understudied. To address the gap, this study compares U.S. and Chilean mothers’ practices in socialization of gender through use of mental state language. Drawing on 90 Chilean and 52 U.S. mother–infant dyads, we examined variation in the frequencies of mothers’ utterances of five types of mental references—emotion, desire, physiological states, causal talk, and cognition—to determine whether they varied by country and infant gender. Infant age ranged between 10 and 15 months. The frequencies with which both U.S. and Chilean mothers in our sample talked about most mental references did not vary according to infant gender, with the exceptions of causal talk in the United States. Specifically, the U.S. mothers used more causal talk with girls than boys. There were more similarities than differences in maternal use of the mental references in the U.S. and Chilean samples. This study did not observe gendered socialization practices through the use of these mental references in infancy among the U.S. and Chilean mothers. Instead, the current study suggests that, using mothers’ mental references in the child’s first year as the indicator, both gender-neutral and cross-gendered socialization practices emerge in the United States, and only gender-neutral socialization practices emerge in Chile.

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“…Also, 5 year-olds in this study presented various mental state terms. Our study shows that 5-year-olds' mental state terms used in narratives on shared-experience are influenced by teachers who used varying amounts of mental state talk (King & La Paro, 2015). This implies that the experiences acquired by having conversation about their project process, teacher and peers can help other children to tell narrative and use rich mental state terms for evaluation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 80%

A Study on Young Children’s Narratives with Respect to the Personal experience at home and Shared Experiences in the kindergarten

Lee¹,

Oh²,

Lee³

2015

Pac Early Child Educ Res Assoc

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This study investigated the differences in 3, 4, and 5 year-olds' developmental level of narratives, use of cohesive devices and mental state terms between aspects of the narratives of personal experience at home and shared experience in the kindergarten. The subjects are 56 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds in Seoul and Gyeonggi-do area. The results are as follows: First, the developmental level of narratives for 3-, 4-, and 5 year-olds in personal experience was lower than that of shared experience, showing a statistically significant difference. This implies that teachers should encourage young children to yield narratives which express their thoughts and feelings during daily experience. Second, the use of logical cohesive devices in personal experience was lower than that of shared experience, showing a statistically significant difference. It is suggested that children use more cohesive devices and de-contextualized language in their narratives when teachers provide language models while interacting with interesting and meaningful educational activities. Third, the use of mental state terms in personal experience was lower than that of shared experience, showing a statistically significant difference. This shows the importance of community activities and teacher's communicative interactions in conversation involving interesting experiences with peers. Further research about this aspect is proposed.

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Teachers’ Language in Interactions: An Exploratory Examination of Mental State Talk in Early Childhood Education Classrooms

Cited by 30 publications

References 42 publications

Caregiver’s Mind-Mindedness in Early Center-based Childcare

Caregiver’s Mind-Mindedness in Early Center-based Childcare

U.S. and Chilean Mothers’ Use of Mental References With Infant Girls and Boys: Comparison of Maternal Practices in Gender Socialization via Language in Two Countries

A Study on Young Children’s Narratives with Respect to the Personal experience at home and Shared Experiences in the kindergarten

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