How mums talk influences children’s perspective-taking ability

New research from Perth's Telethon Institute for Child Health Research has found that young children whose mothers talk with them more frequently and in more detail about people's thoughts and feelings tend to be better at taking another's perspective than other children of the same age.
 
The findings have published today in the international journal Child Development.
 
Study lead author Dr Brad Farrant looked at the influence of the way parents interact with and talk to their children to learn more about how we develop the ability to take another's perspective
 
"Parents who frequently put themselves in someone else's shoes in conversations with their children make it more likely that their children will be able to do the same," he said.
 
The two-year study involved more than 120 Australian children between the ages of 4 and 6 at the start of the study. The study group included children with typically developing language and those who were delayed in their acquisition of language.

The children completed tasks designed to assess their language skills, their ability to infer others' beliefs and use these to predict others' behaviour, and their ability to flexibly shift between different perspectives. Mothers also reported on the types of language they used with their children.
 
Among children with typically developing language, the researchers found that mums who talked more often and in greater detail about people's thoughts and feelings-commenting on how another person might react to a particular situation as well as their own feelings about the topic at hand-had children with better language skills and better perspective-taking skills.
 
"This suggests that mothers' use of this type of language influences their children's language ability and cognitive flexibility, which in turn appears to influence their development of theory of mind, a key component in learning to take another's perspective," he said.
 
Children with delayed language acquisition were delayed in their development of perspective-taking skills-though this wasn't necessarily due to their mother's use of language.

"This highlights the role played by language as children develop the ability to take another's perspective," Dr Farrant said.
 
"Solving the many challenges that the world faces today requires us all to get better at taking the perspective of other people."

The study was supported by a University of Western Australia Hackett scholarship and a University of Western Australia completion scholarship.
 
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Citation: Child Development, Vol. 83, Issue 1, Language, Cognitive Flexibility, and Explicit False Belief Understanding: Longitudinal Analysis in Typical Development and Specific Language Impairment by Farrant, BM, Maybery, MT, and Fletcher, J (University of Western Australia). Copyright 2011 The Society for Research in Child Development, Inc. All rights reserved.