Mother-Child Participation in Conversation About the Past: Relationships to Preschoolers' Theory of Mind

Forty 3.5- to 4.5-year-olds discussed 3 past events with their mothers and completed a set of theory of mind tasks indexing their ability to reason about conflicting mental representations and their understanding of knowledge. Semipartial correlations and analyses of covariance showed that children&...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Developmental psychology 1997-07, Vol.33 (4), p.618-629
Main Author: Welch-Ross, Melissa K
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age Differences
Attention
Autobiographical memory
Autobiographical Recall
Awareness
Biological and medical sciences
Child
Child development
Child Language
Child, Preschool
Children & youth
Cognitive Ability
Cognitive Development
Concept Formation
Conversation
Developmental psychology
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Individual Development
Individuality
Language Proficiency
Male
Memory
Mental Recall
Metacognition
Mother Child Communication
Mother-Child Relations
Mother-preschool child interactions
Mothers
Parent Child Relationship
Preschool Children
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reasoning
Relationship
Response Parameters
Social Cognition
Theory of Mind
Time Perspective
Verbal Behavior
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Summary:Forty 3.5- to 4.5-year-olds discussed 3 past events with their mothers and completed a set of theory of mind tasks indexing their ability to reason about conflicting mental representations and their understanding of knowledge. Semipartial correlations and analyses of covariance showed that children's theory of mind scores were related to their participation in memory conversations, independent of age and linguistic skill. The frequency with which mothers provided new information was related to children's theory of mind scores, although mothers' direct replies to children were generally unrelated to children's understanding of mind. This research takes an important step toward examining the relevance of theory of mind skills to real-world, social interaction. The results have implications for explaining the emergence of autobiographical memory.
ISSN:0012-1649
1939-0599
DOI:10.1037/0012-1649.33.4.618