Maternal language use during mother-child interactions and the development of ToM in Chinese children

Mothers’ preference for introducing and elaborating on mental states in conversations with their young children has been shown to be a significant predictor of children’s Theory of Mind development among Western samples. However, it is unclear whether this relationship still holds true in the Chinese cultural context. Exploratory in nature, the present study aims to study the relationship between mothers’ mental state talk and the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) in Chinese children (4-5 years old) following the framework of Peterson and Slaughter’s (2003) research. All participants (N = 94) were from middle-income families and were Chinese mothers of a 4-5-year-old typically developing children. Fifty-two pre-schoolers (M = 4.47 years, SD = .49) were boys. Adopting a correlational study design, the current study first looks at if there were individual differences in mothers’ conversational styles with their children. By running correlational analyses examining the relationships between different conversational styles, this assumption was confirmed. Given individual differences did exist, Pearson’s correlation was performed to decide if mothers’ preferences of language use significantly correlated with ToM development in Chinese children. The result from the correlation analysis indicated that no significant correlation emerged between mothers' self-reported preferences for sophisticated explanations of mental states and parental report of children's ToM. This null result was again confirmed by a hierarchical regression analysis showing that mothers’ conversational preferences were not predictors of Chinese children’s ToM development when relevant control variables were included in the analyses. Additionally, two correlational analyses were conducted to address the research question that whether children’s age and expressive vocabulary correlate with parental reports of ToM understandings. No correlation was found between age and ToM ability. However, there was a significant correlation between children’s expressive language and ToM, giving further support to the social constructivist account. An independent samples t-test to test the gender effect on parental-report ToM yielded no significant results. Evidence of Internal consistency, content validity, and construct validity for the two translated questionnaires was given. However, accurate estimation of the psychometric properties of the two translated measures requires more research. Finally, Implications and future directions for research on the relationship between maternal mental state talk and ToM development in diverse and larger samples from a longitudinal lens were discussed.