Theory of Mind: a Hidden Factor in Reading Comprehension?

Dore, Rebecca A.; Amendum, Steven J.; Golinkoff, Roberta Michnick; Hirsh‐Pasek, Kathy

doi:10.1007/s10648-018-9443-9

Cited by 85 publications

(71 citation statements)

References 90 publications

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“…It is assumed that when children have developed this understanding that beliefs can be false (i.e., they can change and differ from reality), they have developed a metarepresentational understanding of the mind (Perner, 1991). This understanding may support them in understanding multiple perspectives and psychological causality earlier, more quickly, and more flexibly (Dore et al, 2018). Consequently, having developed a metarepresentational ToM understanding may support children's text comprehension via inference making skills about an author's intentions, and characters' thoughts and feelings (Cain, 2016;Kim, 2017).…”

Section: Theory Of Mind (Tom)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Language Competencies and Advanced Measures of Mental State Understanding Are Differently Related to Listening and Reading Comprehension in Early Adolescence

Ebert

2020

Front. Psychol.

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The present study tests a section of the DIET (direct and indirect effects model of text comprehension; Kim, 2017) model and focuses on the relations between early language skills, various facets of mental state understanding, and text comprehension. In a sample of 267 children, I analyzed the relations between language skills (vocabulary, sentence comprehension) at age 3;6, theory of mind (ToM) at age 5;6, mental state language and metacognitive knowledge at age 9;2, and children's listening and reading comprehension of texts at age 13;7 years. For reading comprehension, results favored a total mediation model that included only direct links from metacognitive knowledge and mental state language to reading comprehension. For listening comprehension, by contrast, a model that also included direct relations from language and ToM in preschool was favored. Metacognitive skills did not mediate the relation between early skills and later text comprehension but, along with mental state language, showed direct relations with reading comprehension beyond listening comprehension. Early language skills showed various indirect relations with later reading comprehension via ToM, mental state language, and listening comprehension, whereas ToM showed only small indirect relations with later reading comprehension via later listening comprehension. These different relations of the various components with later listening in contrast to reading comprehension are discussed.

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Section: Theory Of Mind (Tom)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Language Competencies and Advanced Measures of Mental State Understanding Are Differently Related to Listening and Reading Comprehension in Early Adolescence

Ebert

2020

Front. Psychol.

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“…Since narrative content has to be construed, a great challenge for children is to make inferences about and remember the original story's plot. This cognitive effort is reflected in studies indicating that children's narrative retelling is related to individual differences in IQ and (socio-)cognitive development (Humphries et al, 2004;Genereux and McKeough, 2007;Nicolopoulou and Richner, 2007;Dore et al, 2018;Shamir et al, 2018). Our study attempted to address this issue, evaluating the linguistically encoded story components of narrative retellings as a function of differing media inputs, with additional consideration of children's IQ as an influential variable.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s Narrative Elaboration After Reading a Storybook Versus Viewing a Video

et al. 2020

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Previous studies have found that narrative input conveyed through different media influences the structure and content of children's narrative retellings. Visual, televised narratives appear to elicit richer and more detailed narratives than traditional, orally transmitted storybook media. To extend this prior work and drawing from research on narrative elaboration, the current study's main goal was to identify the core plot component differences (the who, what, where, when, why, and how of a story) between children's retellings of televised versus traditional storybook narratives. However, because children also differ individually in their IQ, we further incorporated this variable into our analysis of children's narrative retellings. For our purpose, a novel coding schema was developed, following and extending the existing narrative elaboration approaches. Participants were 46 typically developing children aged 4-5 years from Germany. The current study incorporated two narrative input conditions to which children were randomly assigned: in the video condition, children watched a non-verbal, visually conveyed, televised story from a DVD; and in the book condition, children read the story with an adult and experienced an orally conveyed version in the form of a book with minimal accompanying pictures. In both conditions, the same story was conveyed. After including IQ as a covariate in our analyses, results show that the children from the video condition gave significantly more elaborated retellings, particularly across the who, what, and where (sub-)components. Differences between the conditions in the component when, how and why did not reach statistical significance. Our findings indicate that different media types entail differential cognitive processing demands of a story, resulting in type-specific memories and narratives. The effect of different medial conditions was significant and persisted when individual differences in cognitive development were considered. Consequences for children's development, education, and interaction with and within today's digital world are discussed.

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“…Recent studies continue to explore ToM "impairment" in both children (for example, Lecheler et al 2020) and adults (for example, Rosenthal et al 2019), frequently positioning these studies within explorations of support for ToM (Holopainen et al 2019;Lecheler et al 2020) or exploring ToM as an element to examine or decode autism presentation (Livingston et al 2019). Reading is a complex task involving the application of knowledge of vocabulary and grammar, together with accessing of prior knowledge, the generation of inference, self-monitoring of understanding and the integration of each of these with information from the text (Kim 2017), with ToM increasingly recognised as an important element to the successful management of this task (Atkinson et al 2017;Dore et al 2018). It may be the case that some autistic readers experience this complexity, and specifically the ToM element of "putting themselves in another's shoes", in an altered way (McIntryre et al, 2017;McIntyre et al 2018).…”

Section: Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although there has been study of the effect of autism on understanding fiction (for example, Whalon 2018;McIntyre et al 2017McIntyre et al , 2018Dore et al 2018), and although there has been considerable discussion of the representation of autism within fiction (for example, Lawrence 2020; Loftis, 2015; Semino 2014), there has been less consideration of how autism may affect the experience of reading fiction from the autistic perspective. All autistic people are different and will experience their autism differently.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Howling at the scrabble-board”: exploring classroom literature from an autistic viewpoint

Lawrence

Celia

Collyer

et al. 2020

English in Education

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There has, to date, been little discussion of how autism may affect the experience of the reading of fiction for pupils in the classroom, other than through a deficit model. One of the researchers in this study ("Celia") is training to be a secondary school English teacher and identifies as autistic. Her experience provides an enriched understanding of the subject and enables the study to be undertaken in line with best practice for autism research. Her experiences are explored within the concepts of Theory of Mind, empathic regulation, language awareness and local rather than global processing bias. Impact on managing authentic engagement with texts for all pupils is discussed, together with specific questions for teachers regarding appropriate support for-and celebration ofautistic pupils' reactions to fiction.

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Theory of Mind: a Hidden Factor in Reading Comprehension?

Cited by 85 publications

References 90 publications

Early Language Competencies and Advanced Measures of Mental State Understanding Are Differently Related to Listening and Reading Comprehension in Early Adolescence

Early Language Competencies and Advanced Measures of Mental State Understanding Are Differently Related to Listening and Reading Comprehension in Early Adolescence

Children’s Narrative Elaboration After Reading a Storybook Versus Viewing a Video

“Howling at the scrabble-board”: exploring classroom literature from an autistic viewpoint

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