More than words: maternal mental state talk as a form of dynamic scaffolding supporting theory of mind

Abstract

This study longitudinally investigated the relation between maternal mental state (MS) language when narrating a familiar wordless storybook and preschoolers’ theory of mind (ToM) abilities. Mother-child dyads in Turkey participated in the study at two time points, approximately one year apart (121 dyads at Time 1, 81 dyads at Time 2). At each time point mothers narrated the storybook twice, over two sessions approximately one week apart. Familiarity was controlled by analyzing the second narration of the story. In addition, the study added to the literature with a comprehensive two-tier MS language scheme that coded for types of MS (e.g. desire, perception, cognition) and their referents (mother-child vs. story character). Parallel to previous findings, cognitive MS talk was related to children’s ToM. In line with expectations, the under-studied category of perception language was also consistently related to ToM. MS language with mother-child referents (MS-IR) was consistently negatively related to ToM whereas MS language with story character referents (MS-DC) was consistently positively related. However, both MS-IR and MS-DC, as well as EF, were found to positively predict children’s ToM at Time 2 when age, vocabulary, syntactic abilities, ToM at Time 1 and mother-reporter frequency of book reading at home were controlled. The findings are discussed from a sociocultural framework as supporting the conceptualization of MS language with different referents as sensitive support tools with complementary functions.