Child language and parent discipline mediate the relation between family income and false belief understanding.
Achieving false belief understanding is an important cognitive milestone that allows children to understand that thoughts and reality can differ. Researchers have found that low-income children score significantly lower than middle-income children on false belief understanding but have not examined why this difference exists. We hypothesized that children's language and parent discipline mediate the income-false belief relation. Participants were 174 3- to 6-year-olds. False belief understanding was significantly correlated with family income, children's vocabulary, parents' self-reported discussion of children's behavior, discussion of emotions, and power assertion. Family income had a significant indirect effect on false belief understanding through children's vocabulary and parent discipline when examined independently, but only through children's vocabulary when using parallel multiple mediation. This study contributes to our knowledge of individual differences in false belief understanding.
Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University at Lima, Lima, OH 45804, USA. Electronic address: tompkins.73@osu.edu.
Virginia
V
Tompkins
Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43201, USA.
Jessica A R
JAR
Logan
Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University at Lima, Lima, OH 45804, USA.
Daniel F
DF
Blosser
Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University at Lima, Lima, OH 45804, USA.
Kaylin
K
Duffy
D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D032882:Comprehension; D008192:Deception; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007182:Income; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D016487:Parenting / Q000523:psychology*; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D056345:Theory of Mind; D014825:Vocabulary
Cross-sectional study; False belief understanding; Family income; Parent discipline; Social cognition; Vocabulary