Lessico psicologico e teoria della mente: uno studio con bambini di scuola primaria

Mental state talk and theory of mind: A study with school aged children. This study investigated the relationship between mental state talk and theory of mind in children attending primary school. A total of 120 children (mean age = 9 years and 8 months; SD = 12.7 months) took part in the study. They were equally distributed by gender and were divided into two groups of age (8 and 10 years old children). The participants were tested with linguistic, metalinguistic, metacognitive and cognitive measures in order to assess the following competences: the use of mental state talk (Meins, Fernyhough, Johnson, Lidstone, 2006), the understanding of metacognitive and metalinguistic verbs (Antonietti, Liverta Sempio, Marchetti, 2006b), the metalinguistic comprehension (TAM-2; Pinto, Candilera, Iliceto, 2003), the understanding of second order false beliefs (Liverta Sempio, Marchetti, Castelli, Lecciso e Pezzotta, 2005), and the comprehension of emotion (Albanese, Molina, 2008). As predicted, significant correlations between children’s use and comprehension of mental state talk on one hand, and their performances on theory-of-mind tasks on the other hand were found; moreover, regression analysis showed that metacognitive and metalinguistic abilities are the best predictors of children’s performance both on false belief tasks and the TEC. The comparison as a function of age highlighted significant differences between the two groups, since 10 years-old children outperformed younger participants in all the tasks. Analyses as a function of gender revealed that girls produced longer texts than boys. No further gender differences were found.