Displaying 1 - 3 of 3
This paper presents a selective review of the literature addressing the influence of young children's conversational environments and interactions on their psychological understanding of persons. Our dual purposes are to reveal some consensus on the current state of knowledge and to foster a programmatic approach to future research. The initial sections clarify what is meant by conversation and describe the nature of theory-of-mind development. We adopt the term socio-cognitive development to convey the fact that children's theory-of-mind understanding becomes more elaborate and flexible throughout childhood, and we discuss issues of measurement. The following sections deal directly with the influence of conversational environments and interactions on children's socio-cognitive understanding. We present findings that suggest that conversational interactions are of fundamental importance for the development of children's socio-cognitive understanding, and we examine the particular aspects of the former that have been shown to be the most effective in promoting the latter. We discuss the relationship between children's conversational references to thoughts and feelings and experimental assessments of their socio-cognitive understanding, and we offer a detailed list of considerations for future research. In the remaining sections, we highlight the important roles of (i) young children's expanding linguistic competence and (ii) their relationships, and we discuss implications for individual differences in children's developing social competence.
Although numerous studies of preschoolers report robust associations between performance on tests of executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM), a lack of developmentally appropriate tasks so far has limited research on these cognitive skills in younger children. Here, we present new batteries of EF and ToM tasks that were administered to 140 two-year-olds from predominantly disadvantaged families, with analyses based on 129 children. Our results showed a strong association between EF and ToM, which remained significant when effects of verbal ability were controlled. Individual differences in EF and ToM were also examined in relation to both distal family factors (social disadvantage, number of siblings) and proximal family factors (quality of child's relationships with parents and siblings). Social disadvantage predicted significant variance in both EF and ToM but did not contribute to the association between these domains. Associations between positive parent-child relationships and both EF and ToM were nonsignificant when verbal ability was controlled. In contrast, positive sibling relationships predicted significant variance in ToM, even controlling for age, verbal ability, EF, social disadvantage, and parent-child relationships.
Twenty years after research on children's ‘theory of mind’ began, this field continues to be a leading influence in the study of developmental psychology and psychopathology. In this review we examine the contribution of research on children's theories of mind to our understanding of children's developing social relationships. Evidence shows that for both typical and atypical populations this relationship is neither uniform nor unidirectional. Theory-of-mind skills are multifaceted and the nature of the developmental relationship between different aspects is not yet known, and there is evidence that theory-of-mind skills both transform and are transformed by interpersonal and family relationships and by language communities. To understand the multifaceted and complex nature of development in this area, we need clearer definitions of the skills under investigation, as well as research designs that capture the transactional nature of the relationship between theory of mind and social relations. Addressing these issues should help to clarify (i) the processes by which children's developing understanding of others is influenced by the social environment, and (ii) issues concerning the specificity of theory-of-mind impairments in atypical populations and the processes by which these impairments develop.