Abstract
This study investigated the relationship between teachers' mental state talk and young children's theory of mind with a quasi-experiment. In total, 56 young children were assigned to the experiment group (meanage = 41 months, SD = 2.47, 46% girls) and the control group (meanage = 40.68 months, SD = 2.23, 43% girls). The experiment group was engaged in a 12-week intervention program with mental state talk in storytelling, casual conversations, and role-playing games, whereas the control group received no interventions. All the children were tested with three theory of mind (ToM) tasks before and after the intervention. The results indicated that the experimental group had a significant improvement in the ToM scores, whereas the control group showed no significant change. The educational implications of these findings are discussed.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Developmental Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
The results indicated that the experimental group had a significant improvement in the theory of mind (ToM) scores, whereas the control group showed no significant change
In the ToM unexpected content task, no significant differences were found between the experimental group and the control group, t = −0.24, p > 0.05
Summary
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Developmental Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Young children can usually pass false belief tasks and acquire a mature theory of mind (ToM) by age 5 years (Carr et al, 2018) This is because parents’ use of mental state language plays a direct and causal role in the development of ToM in young children (Devine and Hughes, 2018, 2019). The research focus has been shifted to parental influences, especially mothers’ mental talk during the mother–child interactions This is because early social interactions could promote children’s ToM development; mother–child interaction is one of the most important ones in the early years (Feldman, 1992). Few studies have explored the impact of teachers’ mental state talk on young children’s ToM development, which is exactly the research gap to be filled by this study
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