title: Story discourse and use of mental state language between mothers and school-aged children with and without visual impairment.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Lack of sight compromises insight into other people's mental states. Little is known about the role of maternal language in assisting the development of mental state language in children with visual impairment (VI).
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  To investigate mental state language strategies of mothers of school-aged children with VI and to compare these with mothers of comparable children with typically developing vision. To investigate whether the characteristics of mother-child discourse were associated with the child's socio-communicative competence.
  
  
  METHODS
  Mother-child discourse with twelve 6-12-year-old children with VI was coded during a shared book-reading narrative and compared with 14 typically sighted children matched in age and verbal ability.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Mothers of children with VI elaborated more and made significantly more references to story characters' mental states and descriptive elaborations than mothers of sighted children. Mental state elaborations of mothers in the VI group related positively with the level produced by their children, with the association remaining after mothers' overall verbosity and children's developmental levels were controlled for. Frequency of maternal elaborations, including their mental state language, was related to socio-communicative competence of children with VI.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The findings offer insights into the potential contribution of maternal verbal scaffolding to mentalistic language and social-communicative competences of children with VI.
authors.affiliation: MRC Centre of Epidemiology for Child Health, Centre for Paediatric Epidemiology and Biostatistics, UCL Institute of Child Health, London, UK.
authors.forename: Valerija
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Tadić
authors.forename: Linda
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Pring
authors.forename: Naomi
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Dale
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002652:Child Behavior; D002657:Child Development; D002663:Child Language; D003142:Communication; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D009034:Mother-Child Relations / Q000523:psychology*; D009035:Mothers / Q000523:psychology*; D033262:Narration; D011932:Reading; D012919:Social Behavior; D014786:Vision Disorders / Q000523:psychology*
keywords: mental state language; mother-child discourse; visual impairment