The Role of Language Games in Children's Understanding of Mental States: A Training Study

Abstract

In this study the authors investigated whether training preschool children in the use of mental state lexicon plays a significant role in bringing about advanced conceptual understanding of mental terms and improved performance on theory-of-mind tasks. A total of 70 participants belonging to two age groups (3 and 4 years old) were randomly assigned to experimental and control conditions. All participants were pretested and posttested with linguistic and cognitive measures. Analyses of pretest data did not show any significant differences between experimental and control groups. During a 2-month period of intervention, children were read stories enriched with mental lexicon. After listening to a story, the experimental group took part in language games and conversations aimed at stimulating children to use mental terms. In contrast, the control group did not participate in any special linguistic activities. The results show that training had a significant effect on emotion understanding and metacognitive vocabulary comprehension in the 3-year-old group and on false-belief understanding and metacognitive vocabulary comprehension in the 4-year-old group.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported by a grant from F.A.R. 2006 (University of Milano Bicocca, Italy) to Ilaria Grazzani Gavazzi. It is part of the requirements for a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Milano Bicocca, Italy. Preliminary results were presented in April 2008 at the Workshop on Pragmatics and Social Cognition in London, England (Ornaghi et al., 2008).

We would like to thank Ilaria Orlandi, Erika Perego, and Laura Viscardi for their contribution to the study. We are also very grateful to the head teachers, teachers, and pupils of the participating schools. We wish to thank Dr. Clare O'Sullivan for the English revision of the article and Dr. Carlo Di Chiacchio for his assistance with the statistical analysis.

Notes

¹The data on the age of participants refer to the pretest phase. At the posttest, the mean age was 4;4 (SD = 6.67 months). An average of 5.2 months elapsed between pretest and posttest.

²Independent samples t-tests were run to compare children's performance on the pretests as a function of group condition. No significant differences emerged between experimental and control groups.

³The book was created in collaboration with Dr. Ilaria Orlandi and Dr. Erika Perego. Ilaria Orlandi produced the illustrations for the 16 stories.

⁴The technique of “word launching” consists of saying a word and inviting the children to say freely what this word means to them or reminds them of (Ciceri, 2001).

Note. Numbers in parentheses are standard deviations.

The average values marked with superscripts a through d were found to be statistically significant on application of a post-hoc Bonferroni correction; a and b denote the comparisons between experimental and control groups for each of the pretest and posttest measures; c and d denote comparisons between pretest and posttest scores for experimental and control conditions, respectively.

Note. Numbers in parentheses are standard deviations.

The average values marked with superscripts a through d were found to be statistically significant on application of a post-hoc Bonferroni correction; a and b denote the comparisons between experimental and control groups for each of the pretest and posttest measures; c and d denote comparisons between pretest and posttest scores for experimental and control conditions, respectively.