The effects of adding metacognitive language to story texts

By Joan Peskin, Janet Wilde Astington. 2004

155 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This study investigated whether exposing Kindergarten children to metacognitive language results in a greater conceptual understanding of mental states, and increased production and comprehension of metacognitive vocabulary. Over a 4-week period, parents, teachers and graduate assistants read about 70 picture books to each participant ( N =48, mean age 4;6). The experimental group received books with text rich in explicit metacognitive terms. The control group received the same books with no metacognitive language but with most stories and accompanying illustrations implicitly requiring children to think about alternative perspectives. Results from pre-test to post-test show firstly, that exposing children to explicit metacognitive vocabulary resulted in significantly more metacognitive verb production in story telling but no improvement in metacognitive language comprehension. This demonstrates Nelson’s [ Language in Cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind , Cambridge University Press, New York, 1996] notion that children “use” such vocabulary before fully understanding the concepts. A second finding was that the control group children outperformed the experimental group on a false-belief explanation battery. This suggests that hearing numerous metacognitive terms in stories is less important than having to actively construct one’s own mentalistic interpretations from illustrations and text that implicitly draw attention to mental states.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ad307e95442238e851b61f9799c4a215f0803810

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Getting Vygotskian about theory of mind: Mediation, dialogue, and the development of social understanding (2008, unknown): “Peskin and Astington (2004) obtained pre- and post-training measures of theory-of-mind performance for 4-year-olds in two conditions, one in which children were read picture books modified to include high frequencies of metacognitive language, and one in which the same pictures implicitly required…”
The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience (2008, background): “A study by Peskin and Astington (2004) illustrates this idea.”
The neural bases of social cognition and story comprehension. (2011, background): “…employed during narrative comprehension, as readers infer the mental states of characters in a manner similar to how mental states are inferred in real-life conspecifics (Astington 1990, Bruner 1986, Keen 2007, Mar 2004, Mar & Oatley 2008, Mason & Just 2009, Peskin & Astington 2004, Zunshine 2006).”
Mindful storytellers: Emerging pragmatics and theory of mind development (2013, background): “…suggest that even if mental state concepts are not made explicit verbally, children’s participation in social discourse improves their narrative skills and promotes ToM understanding (Adrián et al., 2007; Guajardo & Watson, 2002; Howard et al., 2008; Peskin & Astington, 2004; Ruffman et al., 2002).”
The Role of Language in Theory of Mind Development. (2014, background): “Research shows that for facilitating ToM development, it is important that the emotions, desires, and cognitions of the characters in the story not just be labeled but discussed and related to the experiences of the children being read to (Ornaghi et al., 2011; Peskin & Astington, 2004).”
The Role of Language Games in Children's Understanding of Mental States: A Training Study (2011, background): “Key findings supporting the conversational hypothesis emerged from a training study by Peskin and Astington (2004) in which the authors examined whether exposing 4-year-old children to explicit metacognitive terms in story texts resulted in advanced conceptual understanding of their own and other…”
Exposure to media and theory-of-mind development in preschoolers (2010, background): “Children’s stories are social in nature, centering on interactions between individuals who often have competing goals and frequently describe situations in which characters hold diverging beliefs (Peskin & Astington, 2004).”