Language and Theory of Mind

Theory of mind is the capacity for understanding how thoughts and feelings underlie what people say and do. It is the interpretive key that helps people make sense of the social world. Children's language acquisition is the pathway for their participation in the social world. With language, children share thoughts, feelings, and meaning with others. Together, theory of mind and language catalyze the development of social understanding in childhood. This book is about research and theory devoted to understanding how that happens. Research on language and theory of mind spans multiple disciplines and multiple decades. This book organizes and integrates the expansive literature, providing a comprehensive portrait of what we know, and still need to know, about the role of language in children's understanding of the mental world. The authors discuss how children come to talk about the mind, the contributions of caregiver-child conversation to theory of mind development, and the pragmatic skills infants and children need for a meeting of the minds within conversation. Coverage also explores the fundamental relation that theory of mind has with narrative comprehension and engagement with fiction throughout the lifespan. Excerpts from parent-child conversations in each chapter illuminate how the social use of language is tied to understanding the mind. The authors synthesize the language-theory of mind literature into a cohesive presentation intended for researchers and graduate students in psychology and related fields such as education, philosophy, and psycholinguistics, as well as practitioners who work with children in clinical and educational settings.

Derek E. Montgomery is a Professor of Psychology at Bradley University. His research on the relation between language and theory of mind has appeared in a number of journals and in the edited volume Why Language Matters for Theory of Mind (Oxford University Press). He holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Florida and received the Dissertation Award in Developmental Psychology from Division 7 of the American Psychological Association. Virginia Tompkins is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at The Ohio State University-Lima. Her research focuses on social cognition in early childhood, in particular how theory of mind relates to children's language skills, parent-child conversation, parent discipline, and how shared book reading promotes theory of mind development. She is currently the Principal Investigator (with Derek Montgomery, Rebecca Dore, and Xin Feng as Co-PIs) of a National Science Foundation award investigating the home literacy environment and parents' mental state talk as predictors of change in theory of mind and narrative comprehension over the year leading to kindergarten entry. Back flap text