Children's Expression of Emotional and Cognitive Mental States in their Story Generation from Pictures

Abstract

The ability to tell stories requires an understanding of linguistic, cognitive, and social domains (Tager-Flusberg & Sullivan, 1995). An effective narrator not only has to structure the story in an intelligible way so that the listener understands the setting, characters, events, and outcomes of the story (Rumpf, Kamp-Becker, Becker, & Kauschke, 2012), but also needs to consider the perspectives of the characters in order to explain their motivations and reactions (Stein & Glenn, 1979). Models of story knowledge such as Story Grammar attempt to capture information that adults and children consider important to include in stories; this model has been used clinically describe and measure children's knowledge of stories (Schneider, Hayward, & Dube, 2006). Children frequently omit story grammar units that involve characters' thoughts and feelings, such as internal responses and plans (Hughes, McGillivray, & Schmidek, 1997). However, even very young children will describe thoughts and emotions in their personal narratives (Peterson, 2010). It is possible that children may express their understanding of characters' thoughts and feelings in more indirect ways, for example, through the use of mental state terms, which are words that describe the internal feelings and thoughts of others. Mental state terms can be divided into subcategories, such as emotional terms (“happy,” “sad,” “feel”) and cognitive ones (“think,” “remember,” “know”). Understanding and use of mental state terms in language tasks show a developmental progression (Leonard & Sheldon, 1985; Hughes & Dunn, 1998) .The use of mental state language in narratives would indicate an understanding of characters' feelings and thoughts and that characters can have different perspectives on the same event. Narratives have been used to compare the difference in mental state term use between monolingual and bilingual children of different languages (Fuste-Herrmann, Silliman, Bahr, Fasnacht, & Federico, 2006) and between children with and without language impairment (Johnson, Miller, & Tallal, 2001) and cognitive delay (Rumpf et al, 2012). An investigation of mental state terms in typically developing children's stories across a range of ages could shed light on the development of children's expression of the feelings and thoughts of fictional characters.