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Article Excerpt
In relating parent-child conversation to children's social cognitive development, we examined how mother-child dyads talked about the psychological world. Seventy mothers and their 3- to 5-year-old children made up a story about a series of pictures depicting a sequence of events involving a false belief. Mother-child talk was coded for the use of mental state terms as well as talk about important aspects of the depicted events. The children were given 2 false belief tasks. When age was controlled, mental state term use was associated with children's false-belief understanding. However, when mental state terms and talk about the aspects of the false-belief component of the story were both taken into account, only talk about the false-belief section of the story accounted for significant additional variance in children's false-belief understanding. We suggest that these results encourage a broader view of talk about the psychological world beyond an exclusive focus on the use of mental state terms.
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Understanding persons in psychological terms is an essential part of typical human competence, and investigating how this social understanding develops is an important question with implications for many aspects of children's lives. There is now consistent evidence that language is important for social cognitive development (e.g., Astington & Baird, 2005: Cutting & Dunn, 1999: Happe, 1995: Jenkins & Astington, 1996). Children's linguistic ability and the language to which children are exposed have both been linked to their false-belief understanding (e.g., Milligan, Astington, & Dack, 2007: Rosnay & Hughes, 2006). One source of evidence is that deaf children of hearing parents have consistently been found to be delayed in false-belief understanding relative to their age mates, whereas deaf children of deaf parents are not delayed (e.g., Schick, Villiers, Villiers, & Hoffmeister, 2007). This may be due to lack of exposure to complex language, or it could be due to other differences in social interaction that deaf children may experience.
Various aspects of the language children are exposed to have been more directly investigated. In a classic study on this issue, Dunn, Brown, Slomkowski, Tesla, and Youngblade (1991) found that children with more exposure to family talk about feelings and psychological causality had a better understanding of beliefs when assessed 7 months later at 40 months of age. Although other aspects of language have been of interest, including the possible role of exposure to different perspectives (Harris, 1996, 2005), the primary focus of recent research has been on parents' use of mental state terms, and typically a positive relationship is found between parents' use of mental state terms and children's social cognitive development (e.g., Moore, Furrow, Chiasson, & Patriquin, 1994: Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2006). Further, Ruffman, Slade, and Crowe (2002) reported evidence that mothers' use of mental state terms plays a causal role in the development of children's understanding of false belief and emotions. Although this type of research has extended our understanding of the relations between language and social cognitive development, we argue that this approach can only take us so far. Also, the methodology seems to be based on a potentially problematic view of mind and language, which we critique. We show that there are ways of talking about the psychological world that do not necessarily require the use of mental state terms, and we demonstrate a methodology for studying such talk.
An emphasis on mental state terms tends to result in overlooking the fact that other words may also refer to the psychological world. For example, words such as "hide" or "trick," although not on the typical list of mental state terms, refer to preventing others from knowing about some state of affairs; that is, the mental world is implicated in the use of such words (Russell, 1992; Turnbull & Carpendale, 1999). Furthermore, in a language training study conducted by Lohmann and Tomasello (2003), two conditions were compared that only differed in whether cognitive terms such as "know" and "think" or communication verbs such as "say" and "tell" were used. No differences were found between these conditions. Although this could be attributable to many things, it does seem that tallying mental state terms in parents' talk is missing part of the story, which we already know from previous research (e.g., Dunn et al., 1991). However, we are not just suggesting that the list of mental state terms should be extended to include words such as "trick," "hide," "look," "see," "tell," and "say" but rather are proposing a more thorough examination of ways of talking about the psychological world. For example, in describing the typical false-belief task, we could explain that Maxi left his chocolate bar in the cupboard and went outside to play. While he was outside his mother moved the chocolate. When Maxi returns, where will he look to find his chocolate? These sentences set up a situation of false belief yet do not include mental state terms. Thus, there may be forms of talk that help children understand social situations involving beliefs, desires, and intentions that do not necessarily contain mental state terms.
If talk about the psychological world can be accomplished with many different words, why have researchers recently focused on mental state terms? We suggest that notwithstanding the methodological ease of counting such terms, part of the reason for this focus is that it follows directly from widely held beliefs about the relation between language and social cognitive development. Most theories of social cognitive development seem to be based on a common view of the problem children face in learning about the mind and a common view about the nature of mind and language. It is generally assumed that an individual has special private and accurate access to her or his own mind but that the minds of other persons are not accessible. Learning about ones own mind requires only introspection. From this perspective, learning about other minds can occur through analogy with ones own mind, by inference from others' observable behavior, or through innate neurological capacities that have evolved for dealing with this problem. This view of the mind is also tied up with a common assumption about the nature of language, namely that language is based on word-referent relations (that words stand for what they refer to). In the case of mental state terms, the referent is an inner mental entity. Thus, in this view, mental state terms refer to inner mental entities (beliefs, desires, or intentions) that are causally connected to behavior. Given these related assumptions, it follows that researchers should study parents' use of mental state terms because hearing such terms might allow children to map the words on to their own inner mental states. This view is clearly stated, for example, by Meins, Fernyhough, Wainwright, Das Gupta, Fradley, and Tuckey (2002, p. 1724) in their proposal that exposure to "mentalistic comments" "provides children with an opportunity to integrate their own behavior with an external comment that makes reference to...
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