Mind between the lines: maternal epistemic language as a scaffolding tool for preschoolers’ false belief understanding

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate whether mothers’ epistemic talk differed by child characteristics (i.e., false belief understanding competence level, gender) and contextual features (i.e., story familiarity). A wordless picture book was narrated twice by 120 mothers to their preschool-aged children. Children were categorized as competent (FBU-Competent), in transition (FBU-Transition), or not competent (FBU-None) based on their performance on three first-order false belief tasks. Mothers’ epistemic language was coded for type of referent (mother-child or story character), type of utterance function (question or statement), and type of expression (cognitive, certainty, contrastive). Evidencing mothers’ sensitivity to their children’s socio-cognitive abilities, mothers of FBU-transition children were found to initiate more interactive discourse through the use of epistemic questions. As expected, the mothers’ epistemic language was found to be shaped by the interactive effects of child and contextual variables. Specifically, mothers of FBU-competent children used more epistemic statements with story character reference when the story was familiar. This effect was especially observed in contrastive language, regardless of utterance type. The mothers of FBU-None boys used more epistemic statements with mother-child referents compared to the mothers of FBU-transition boys. Finally, mothers of FBU-Transition girls used more certainty expressions with mother-child referents than mothers of FBU-Competent girls. Overall, these results show that the nature of the epistemic language mothers use with their children is affected interactively by various child and contextual characteristics. Future work that focuses on the individual differences in the accuracy of mothers’ epistemic scaffolding is warranted to lay the groundwork for much-needed intervention studies.