Abstract
In this study, we investigated the relationship between mothers' psychological lexicon and children's cognitive and socio-emotive development as assessed through conceptual and semantic understanding tasks, in addition to the traditional tasks of theory of mind. Currently, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the frequency of mothers' mental state words used in mother-child picture-book reading is linked with children's theory of mind skills. Furthermore, mothers' use of cognitive terms is more strongly related to children's theory of mind performances than the mothers' references to other mental states, such as desires or emotions (Rollo and Buttiglieri, 2009). Current literature has established that early maternal input is related to later child mental state understanding; however it has not yet clarified which maternal terms are most useful for the socio-emotional and cognitive development of the child, and which aspect of the cognitive development benefits from the mother-child interaction. The present study addresses this issue and focuses on the relationship between mothers' mental state talk and children's behavior in conceptual and semantic tasks, and in a theory of mind task. In this study fifty pairs consisting of mothers and their 3 to 6-year-old children participated in two sessions: (1) The mothers read a picture book to their children. To assess the maternal psychological lexicon, their narrative was codified according to the categories of mental state references used in literature: perceptual, emotional, volitional, cognitive, moral, and communicative. (2) After a few days, the conceptual and semantic skills of the children (tasks of contextualization and classification, memory, and definition of words) and their psychological lexicon were assessed. The results suggest close links between the frequency and variety of mothers' mental state words and some semantic and conceptual skills of children.
Highlights
Mother-Child Talk about Inner States and the Development of Theory of MindThere is an abundance of studies showing that language, and in particular, the use of it in social interactions, is at the core of the processes involved in mind understanding
We found some significant differences in mothers’ psychological lexicon with respect to children’s gender and age
The analyses showed that mothers used a higher proportion of Cognitive and Volitional words with older children and a higher proportion of terms referred to Obligation state with boys
Summary
Mother-Child Talk about Inner States and the Development of Theory of MindThere is an abundance of studies showing that language, and in particular, the use of it in social interactions, is at the core of the processes involved in mind understanding. Parents tend to treat the children as social partners and conversationalists almost from birth, and children respond with attentive looks, gurgles, smiles This practice is important to the children’s entering into meaningful communicative exchanges (Astington and Jenkins, 1999; Nelson, 2005). In studying the linguistic correlates of the theory of mind, particular attention has been devoted to psychological lexicon or mental-state language, a type of talk that several studies (e.g., Bretherton and Beeghly, 1982; Bartsch and Wellman, 1995; Camaioni et al, 1998) have classified in the following categories: physiological (e.g., to be hungry, to be thirsty, to be sleepy), perceptual (e.g., to hear, to see, to look, to observe, to recognize, to be cold, to be hot, to feel ill), emotional (e.g., to love, to enjoy, to be afraid, to be sorry), volitional (e.g., to want), cognitive (e.g., to know, to understand, to remember, to think), communicative (e.g., to say, to tell, to call), and moral (e.g., duty = to be obliged to do, power = to have the permission to be good to to be bad)
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