title: Mother-Child Conversation and Children's Social Understanding During Middle Childhood.
abstract: The authors investigated the relationship between mother-child conversation and children's social understanding during middle childhood. Thirty-eight mother-child pairs participated, including a younger group (5-7 years old) and an older group (8-10 years old). Children completed 2 measures of social understanding and mothers and children discussed 4 stories involving social dilemmas. Results indicated that compared to the younger group, the older group (a) performed better on both measures of social understanding and (b) produced more basic mental talk (i.e., talk about beliefs, emotions, personality traits, and desires), and more advanced mental talk (i.e., talk about contrasting perspectives, recursion and relationship between mental states, and advanced emotions). Mothers of older children also produced more basic and advanced mental talk. Mothers' advanced mental talk predicted both children's social understanding and children's advanced mental talk.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , Northern Illinois University , DeKalb , Illinois , USA.
authors.forename: RaeAnne M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Pearson
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , Northern Illinois University , DeKalb , Illinois , USA.
authors.forename: Bradford H
authors.initials: BH
authors.lastname: Pillow
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D003142:Communication; D032882:Comprehension; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D009034:Mother-Child Relations / Q000523:psychology*; D009035:Mothers / Q000523:psychology*; D002666:Psychology, Child; D012737:Sex Factors; D012931:Social Environment
keywords: Conversation; middle childhood; social cognition; theory of mind