The relation between children's and mothers' mental state language and theory-of-mind understanding.

By T. Ruffman, L. Slade, E. Crowe. Child Development, 2002

860 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a04b58eac7b7b489b1617cecf870b62a59ab1442

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Citations in the corpus

How language relates to belief, desire, and emotion understanding (2003, neutral): “This is true in normal development (e.g., Brown, Donelan-McCall, & Dunn, 1996; Dunn, Brown, & Beardsall, 1991a; Dunn, Brown, Slomkowski, Tesla, & Youngblade, 1991b; Jenkins & Astington, 1996; Ruffman, Slade, & Crowe, 2002 ), deaf children (e.g., Peterson & Siegal, 1995; Russell et al.,”
To belief or not belief: Children’s theory of mind (2014, background): “Thus, mothers talk more about the child’s desires initially but later increase their talk about others’ thoughts and knowledge (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995; Ruffman et al., 2002; Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2008).”
Mind-mindedness in children: Individual differences in internal-state talk in middle childhood (2006, background): “A growing corpus of research findings has documented associations between talk about mental states and children’s developing capacities for representing and reasoning with suchmental states (for reviews, see Carpendale & Lewis, 2004; Symons, 2004). Research on links between internal-state language a”
The Interface of Language and Theory of Mind. (2007, background): “There are counter arguments from work in which correlations have not been found between ‘‘syntax’’ broadly defined, and false belief reasoning (Ruffman et al., 2002; Perner et al., 2005).”
The effects of adding metacognitive language to story texts (2004, background): “Ruffman, Slade, and Crowe (2002) also concluded that mothers’ use of mental state terms was correlated with later theory-of-mind understanding.”
Telling the story of theory of mind: Deaf and hearing children's narratives and mental state understanding (2006, background): “It is also probable that mature narrators may tailor their use of mentalistic speech to their intended audience (Peterson & Slaughter, 2003; Ruffman et al., 2002).”
Mothers' and Fathers' Use of Internal State Talk with their Young Children (2008, methodology): “With regard to ToM, for example, Ruffman, Slade, and Crowe (2002) found that preschool-aged children whose mothers used more mental state talk showed greater improvement in ToM ability than those whose mothers did not.”
What mothers say and what they do: The relation between parenting, theory of mind, language and conflict/cooperation (2006, positive): “Ruffman et al. (2002) found that mother mental state talk was related to later theory of mind understanding independent of maternal education, other kinds of mother talk, children’s earlier theory of mind and their earlier general language and specific talk about mental states.”
How do use and comprehension of mental-state language relate to theory of mind in middle childhood? (2012, background): “…an association between the frequency with which they use mental-state terms during spontaneous conversation and their scores on false-belief ToM tasks (Brown, Donelan-McCall, & Dunn, 1996; Hughes, Lecce, & Wilson, 2007; Ornaghi & Grazzani Gavazzi, 2009; Ruffman et al., 2002; Symons, 2004).”
Scaling of theory-of-mind tasks. (2004, background): “ Ruffman et al. (2002) Time 2: Desire-action vs. contents (false belief) 3.41 79 .17”
Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models (2023, background): “ToM has been shown to positively correlate with participating in family discussions (34), the use and familiarity with words describing mental states (32, 35), and reading fiction describing mental states (36, 37).”
The Development of Mentalisation in Children From a Theory of Mind Perspective (2010, background): “These findings have contributed to the widely shared current view that maternal mental state talk and coaching play a key role the development of children's theory of mind ( Ruffman, Slade and Crowe, 2002 ; Jenkins et al, 2003 ; Carpendale and Lewis, 2004; Rosnay and Hughes, 2006 ).”
Mindful storytellers: Emerging pragmatics and theory of mind development (2013, background): “…with which children engage in conversations about mental states predicts their comprehension about mental states (Moore et al., 1994), as well as their performance in ToM and affective perspective-taking tasks (Adrián, Clemente, & Villanueva, 2007; Hughes & Dunn, 1998; Ruffman et al., 2002).”
Language and Children's Understanding of Mental States (2005, background): “Even when efforts are made to bypass problems that late signers might have in grasping the language of such tasks—for example, by substituting a nonverbal (Figueras-Costa & Harris, 2001) or pictorial (Woolfe, Want, & Siegal, 2002) test of mentalstate understanding—late signers still have marked…”
Language and theory of mind: meta-analysis of the relation between language ability and false-belief understanding. (2007, background): “…more generally, has been shown to correlate with false-belief task performance both concurrently and across time, for example, in conversations with friends in the context of pretend play (Hughes & Dunn, 1998), and in conversations with mothers while looking at photographs (Ruffman et al., 2002).”