Metarepresentation in action: 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' developing theories of mind in parent-child conversations

Using a cross-sectional natural language database, the authors investigated the parent-child conversations of 36 three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds to explore 2 issues regarding the development of metarepresentation. First, children's uses of explicit contrastives (ECs)--utterances that explicitly contrast 2 differing mental states--were explored. Four-year-olds and, to a greater extent, 5-year-olds were found to reliably use ECs. Second, parents' responses to children's uses of "I don't know" and implicit contrastives (e.g., contradictions) were examined to determine whether parents took these opportunities to highlight the representational nature of mental states. All children regularly elicited mentalistic responses from their parents and, in some cases, these parental responses were positively related to children's production of mental talk. Findings are discussed in terms of how theory of mind development may be guided by scaffolding processes.