Abstract
Although it is well established that features of maternal speech are associated with children’s social understanding in the preschool years, few studies explore this relationship in middle childhood. Within the context of a prospective longitudinal study of a representative community sample of families (subsample n = 207, mean age = 82.88 months), we investigated concurrent associations between mothers’ internal state language and aspects of 7‐year‐olds’ social understanding, including children’s understanding of belief and spontaneous references to internal states during free play. When sociodemographic, maternal, and child characteristics were controlled, mothers’ references to their own cognitions were associated with dimensions of children’s social understanding. Our findings suggest that exposure to others’ perspectives contributes to children’s advanced understanding of minds, which has implications for interventions that foster social understanding.
Highlights
Many features of children’s early conversational environments have been explored in relation to the development of social understanding
Children who heard more frequent references to their mothers’ cognitions (e.g., “I don’t even know how to do a circle!”) were more likely to pass a second‐order false belief task and talk spontaneously about other people’s cognitions (e.g., “Kate doesn’t know where it is.”). This association remained significant when covariates such as sociodemographic adversity, the child’s age and verbal ability, and the mother’s verbal ability and earlier speech about internal states were taken into account
This pattern of results corroborates previous findings showing positive associations between mothers’ references to cognitive terms in picture book reading tasks and performance on strange stories tasks at ages 7 and 10 (Adrian et al, 2007; Ensor et al, 2014). We have extended these findings by demonstrating the importance of mothers’ use of cognitive terms for other measures of children’s social understanding in middle childhood
Summary
Many features of children’s early conversational environments have been explored in relation to the development of social understanding. Only a few studies explore the ongoing importance of mother–child interactions for older children’s social understanding (e.g., Ensor, Devine, Marks, & Hughes, 2014) We addressed this gap in the literature by investigating contemporaneous associations between mothers’ speech and measures of children’s understanding of minds in middle childhood. Positive associations between mothers’ references to cognitions and children’s social understanding skills are well established for preschool‐age children, few studies explore the ongoing importance of this dimension of mothers’ speech beyond the fifth year of life (Ensor et al, 2014). Mothers’ talk about the child's internal states predicts children’s later references to desires and emotions (Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2006), which suggests that children’s social understanding skills are fostered by caregivers’ speech that encourages children to attend to, reflect on, and represent their own states of mind. It is certainly possible that cognitively able and verbally precocious children might elicit more ISL from their mothers; children’s own references to internal states within the mother–child conversation must be taken into account
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