Mother‐child talk about mental states: The what, who, and how of conversations about the mind

Abstract

AbstractResearch on parents’ mental state talk (MST) and children's social understanding is typically situated within a social constructivist approach, which asserts that parent‐child conversations around mental states promotes children's social understanding. However, prior research has provided a limited view of children's participation in these exchanges or the interaction among qualities of MST. This study examined 67 mothers’ MST while narrating a wordless book with their preschoolers (Mage = 4.51 years) and children's subsequent responses; children were 80% White and 49% female. We coded mothers’ MST for three qualities: (1) category (e.g., cognition), (2) referent (e.g., child), and (3) utterance function (e.g., open‐ended question). Using sequential analysis, we hypothesized that children would respond to mothers’ mental state input with MST or connected talk. We also examined relations among mothers’ mental state category and referent/function. Examining over 1700 utterance pairs, there was considerable matching between mother's and children's MST within categories, children responded in a connected way when MST focused on the child or cognition, and children tended to respond to open‐ended questions and closed questions, but not comments, about mental states. This study provides a novel method for analyzing parent‐child MST, suggests that particular qualities of mothers’ MST tend to co‐occur, and suggests that particular qualities of mental states are especially likely to engage children in MST.