Mental state talk and theory of mind: A training study with preschool children

This study investigated whether training preschool children in the use of mental state talk plays a causal role in a greater conceptual understanding of mental terms and in a better performance on theory-of-mind tasks. The 102 participants were divided into three groups of age (3, 4, and 5 years old) and randomly assigned to two group conditions (experimental and control). All participants were pre- and post-tested with linguistic and cognitive measures in order to assess their language and metacognitive comprehension, emotion comprehension, false-belief understanding, and pragmatic competence. Analyses on pre-test data didn’t show any significant difference between experimental and control group. During the intervention, over a two month period, twice a week and in small groups, children were read stories enriched with mental lexicon. After listening to the story, children belonging to the experimental group took part in language games and conversations aimed at stimulating them to use mental terms. Differently, control group children, after the story, were let playing. Paired t test investigated the Time effect for both experimental and control group. Independent t test was run for comparing post-test data as a function of group condition. As expected, experimental group outperformed control group in the comprehension of metecognitive verbs (t = 5,12; p <.001), the comprehension of emotion (t =2,35; p <.05), and, mostly in 4 years old children, the false belief understanding (t = 2,27; p < 05). In order to examine variables interaction, repeated measure analyses of variance were carried out. Results revealed a significant Time × Age × Group interaction for the metacognitive vocabulary test (F (1,89) = 15,81; p <.001) and the test of emotion comprehension (F (1,93) = 3,82; p <.05). In fact, a stronger effect of the intervention was found in 3 and 4 years old participants.