This paper focuses on the relationship between children’s psychological lexicon and their development of social cognition as assessed through theory-of-mind and emotion understanding tasks. It provides a brief overview of the topic, describes our own previous data, and reports new findings with a larger sample. Participants in our latest study were 102 children of 3, 4 and 5 years of age, randomly assigned to training or control conditions. All the children were pre- and post- tested with linguistic and cognitive measures to assess their language ability, mental-state talk comprehension, false-belief understanding and emotion comprehension. During the intervention, participants in the training condition were read stories enriched with psychological lexicon and took part in language games and conversations aimed at stimulating the use of inner-state terms. As expected, they outperformed the control group at post-test on most of the administered measures. The intervention brought about a stronger improvement in social cognition in the 3- and 4-year old participants. No gender effect emerged
Grazzani, I., Ornaghi, V. (2014). Psychological lexicon and theory-of-mind: Training preschool children to improve their social cognition. In G. Rundblad, A. Tytus, O. Knapton, C. Tang (a cura di), Selected papers from the 4th UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference (pp. 136-151). London : UK Cognitive Linguistics Association.
Psychological lexicon and theory-of-mind: Training preschool children to improve their social cognition
Grazzani, I;Ornaghi, V
2014
Abstract
This paper focuses on the relationship between children’s psychological lexicon and their development of social cognition as assessed through theory-of-mind and emotion understanding tasks. It provides a brief overview of the topic, describes our own previous data, and reports new findings with a larger sample. Participants in our latest study were 102 children of 3, 4 and 5 years of age, randomly assigned to training or control conditions. All the children were pre- and post- tested with linguistic and cognitive measures to assess their language ability, mental-state talk comprehension, false-belief understanding and emotion comprehension. During the intervention, participants in the training condition were read stories enriched with psychological lexicon and took part in language games and conversations aimed at stimulating the use of inner-state terms. As expected, they outperformed the control group at post-test on most of the administered measures. The intervention brought about a stronger improvement in social cognition in the 3- and 4-year old participants. No gender effect emergedI documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.