Maternal storytelling and reminiscing styles in relation to preschoolers’ perspective-taking abilities

Abstract

This study investigated mothers’ narrative styles across storytelling and reminiscing contexts in relation to preschoolers’ visual, socio-cognitive, and syntactic perspective-taking (PT) abilities. The sample consisted of 120 Turkish mothers and their 3- to 5-year-old children. Mother-child dyads were asked to retell a storybook and to reminisce about an event they experienced in the lab. Children’s visual PT, false belief understanding, syntactic PT, and vocabulary were assessed. The results indicated that mothers showed distinct narrative scaffolding styles in each context (storytelling: storyteller and story builder; reminiscing: elicitor, constructor, co-teller). Maternal storytelling styles, but not reminiscing styles were related to children’s age. Children of storytellers performed better in syntactic and visual PT tasks than children of story builders, and children of memory elicitors scored higher in visual PT tasks than children of co-tellers. The implications of these findings are discussed within our understanding of how mother-child discourse affects children’s socio-cognitive development.