THE INFLUENCE OF PARENTAL MENTAL STATE TALK ON CHILDREN'S CONCEPTUAL AND STRATEGIC THEORY-OF-MIND
TEO LER YING, SHERANN
TEO LER YING, SHERANN
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Abstract
Parental mental state talk has been shown to facilitate children's conceptual theory-of-mind (ToM) understanding (Symons, 2004). This study extends previous work by investigating whether parental mental state talk, measured using a storytelling task and the adapted Maternal Mental State Input Inventory (MMSII; Peterson & Slaughter, 2003), improves children's strategic theory-of-mind (SToM) in a zero-sum game, on top of promoting children's conceptual ToM understanding. Specifically, this study examined knowledge access - a relatively unexplored ToM component though it has conceptual links to SToM. One hundred Singaporean children aged 3 to 5 participated in this study with their parents. An indirect mediation was found; the total mental state score from MMSII was significantly related to children's knowledge access ability, which was in turn significantly associated with children's display of SToM behaviour. However, no direct relationship was found between total mental state score from MMSII and children's SToM. Moreover, none of the mental state components from the storytelling task were significantly related to children's knowledge access ability or SToM. This study offers novel insights that are valuable in advising parents on how to adapt their interaction style to better facilitate their children's socio-cognitive development, and in promoting the understanding of SToM behaviour in children.
Keywords
parental mental state talk, theory-of-mind, knowledge access, strategic theory-of-mind
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2019-12-04
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