School of Education, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.
Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43201, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2021 Sep;209:105181. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105181. Epub 2021 May 25.
We investigated the relations among theory of mind (ToM), mental state talk, and discourse comprehension. Specifically, we examined the frequency of mental state talk in children's oral recall of narrative texts and informational texts as well as relations among ToM, mental state talk (inclusion of mental state words in the recall of narrative and informational texts), and narrative and informational text comprehension. Results from children in Grade 4 (N = 132; M = 10.39 years) revealed that a greater number of mental state talk instances appeared in children's recall of narrative texts than in their recall of informational texts, but the mean number also differed across texts within a genre. ToM skill predicted the extent of mental state talk in narrative texts and informational texts, and the relation was stronger for narrative texts than for informational texts, after accounting for vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, working memory, and attentional control. Mental state talk in narrative texts was extremely strongly related to narrative comprehension, whereas mental state talk in informational texts was weakly related to informational text comprehension. Results suggest that ToM skill relates to mental state talk in the recall of texts, and both ToM and mental state talk play greater roles in comprehension of narrative texts than in comprehension of informational texts.
我们研究了心理理论（ToM）、心理状态谈话和话语理解之间的关系。具体来说，我们考察了儿童在口头回忆叙事文本和信息文本时心理状态谈话的频率，以及 ToM、心理状态谈话（在回忆叙事和信息文本时包含心理状态词）与叙事和信息文本理解之间的关系。四年级儿童（N=132；M=10.39 岁）的结果表明，心理状态谈话实例在儿童回忆叙事文本时比在回忆信息文本时出现的更多，但在同一类型的文本中，平均数量也存在差异。在考虑词汇量、语法知识、工作记忆和注意力控制后，ToM 技能预测了叙事文本和信息文本中心理状态谈话的程度，并且这种关系在叙事文本中比在信息文本中更强。叙事文本中的心理状态谈话与叙事理解呈极强相关，而信息文本中的心理状态谈话与信息文本理解呈弱相关。结果表明，ToM 技能与文本回忆中的心理状态谈话有关，而 ToM 和心理状态谈话在叙事文本理解中比在信息文本理解中发挥更大的作用。
