The role of parent talk in connected and unconnected conversations on children's theory-of-mind development

Previous studies have consistently found a positive relationship between parental mental state talk (MST) about desires, emotions, and cognitions as crucial for children's subsequent theory-of-mind development. The present study examined whether connected conversations between the parent and child yielded more parental MST. We employed a within-subjects longitudinal design, testing 48 parents and their children (18- to 26-month-olds) in a series of social games, exploring how parents' quality of talk (defined as initiated, connected, or failed) influenced the content of their talk (MST vs. non-MST). Our findings revealed that parents' use of mental state terms in failed talk (talk that was not connected) at the initial time point was related to children's longitudinal mental state vocabulary acquisition, whereas parents' use of mental state terms in connected talk (when children's subsequent utterance was semantically connected to the parent's) was not. This positive influence of failed parental MST on children's mental state vocabulary was significant even after controlling for potential confounds including children's age, baseline internal state vocabulary, general vocabulary, and connected parent MST. Thus, our results provide compelling evidence that children can learn from conversations that appear disconnected and still learn about mental states when they appear "inattentive," informing strategies aimed at enriching their learning and nurturing their social development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).