The impact of story-based conversations on nursery-school children's psychological lexicon

Plenty of research conducted on children’s development of social cognition has shown that mother-child conversation on inner states improves children’s understanding of “the mind” and their use of psychological lexicon (Hughes, 2011). However, few studies have been carried out in the nursery school using specific intervention procedures. The present study examines the effect of a conversational intervention designed to promote 2-to 3 years old children’s socio-emotional abilities in general, and their use of mental-state talk, in particular, with a specific attention to emotional language. One hundred toddlers (mean age =28 months) took part in the study. An intervention and a control group of 50 children each were constituted controlling for gender, age and results on pre-test measures. Pre- and post-test tasks consisted in a standardized language test (Caselli et al., 2002), a measure of psychological lexicon and a test of emotional competence (Denham, 1986). Moreover, each participant was videotaped during playtime for one hour before and after the intervention. Children in the experimental condition were divided in small groups, and for 3 months were daily read brief illustrated “emotional” stories by trained teachers. Then they were involved in conversations about the expression, causes and regulation of emotions of the story characters. In contrast, the control group played freely after they listened to the stories. Preliminary results of a multivariate analysis of variance revealed significant Time×Group interaction. In fact, at post-test the intervention group performed significantly better than the control group in the spontaneous production of psychological lexicon in general (F= 4.61; p = .03), in the emotional language in particular (F=3.8, p=.05), as well as in the measures of emotional competence (F=5.01; p=.01). The discussion will focus on the importance of conversational intervention procedures carried out by trained educators for promoting the development of toddlers’ socio-emotional and language competences.