Impact of Teacher's Mental State Talk on Young Children's Theory of Mind: A Quasi-Experiment Study

This study investigated the relationship between teachers' mental state talk and young children's theory of mind with a quasi-experiment. In total, 56 young children were assigned to the experiment group (meanage = 41 months, SD = 2.47, 46% girls) and the control group (meanage = 40.68 months, SD = 2.23, 43% girls). The experiment group was engaged in a 12-week intervention program with mental state talk in storytelling, casual conversations, and role-playing games, whereas the control group received no interventions. All the children were tested with three theory of mind (ToM) tasks before and after the intervention. The results indicated that the experimental group had a significant improvement in the ToM scores, whereas the control group showed no significant change. The educational implications of these findings are discussed.

MENTAL STATE TALK: ASSESSMENT THROUGH WORDLESS PICTURE STORY BOOK READING

Mental state talk involves words that describe the mental world of individuals. These could be words that are about thoughts, feelings, desires, intentions, and emotions. There has been dearth of research in Pakistan assessing the parents and teachers’ use of mental state talk in conversation with young children, commonly because of lack of assessment tool that are employed to measure the mental state talk in Pakistan. The present study aimed at validation and development of indigenous tool for the assessment of mental state talk of parents/teachers to use with children. Wordless picture story book reading was selected as one the various methods devised for mental state talk assessment; which facilitates interactions between parents/teachers and their children. For validation, Indigenous picture story books were reviewed for its content and modified through opinion of subject matter experts. Content and face validity of the story book were examined and found to be good. The finding concluded that finalized wordless picture story book has rich mental state content and has great potential to stimulate rich discourse on mental state talk. It will bridge the research gap and will promote as a good measurement instrument for research on mental state talk in Pakistan.

The cultural evolution of mind-modelling

I argue that uniquely human forms of ‘Theory of Mind’ (or ‘ToM’) are a product of cultural evolution. Specifically, propositional attitude psychology is a linguistically constructed folk model of the human mind, invented by our ancestors for a range of tasks and refined over successive generations of users. The construction of these folk models gave humans new tools for thinking and reasoning about mental states—and so imbued us with abilities not shared by non-linguistic species. I also argue that uniquely human forms of ToM are not required for language development, such that an account of the cultural origins of ToM does not jeopardise the explanation of language development. Finally, I sketch a historical model of the cultural evolution of mental state talk.

She Thinks in English, But She Wants in Mandarin: Differences in Singaporean Bilingual English–Mandarin Maternal Mental-State-Talk

Chinese-speaking parents are believed to use less cognitive mental-state-talk than their English-speaking counterparts on account of their cultural goals in socializing their children to follow an interdependence script. Here, we investigated bilingual English–Mandarin Singaporean mothers who associate different functions for each language as prescribed by their government: English for school and Mandarin for in-group contexts. English and Mandarin maternal mental-state-talk from bilingual English–Mandarin mothers with their toddlers was examined. Mothers produced more ‘’cognitive’’ terms in English than in Mandarin and more ‘’desire’’ terms in Mandarin than in English. We show that mental-state-talk differs between bilingual parents’ languages, suggesting that mothers adjust their mental-state-talk to reflect the functions of each language.