Mental state talk in children’s face-to-face and telephone narratives

This study analyzes children's theory of mind through mental state talk in two conditions differing for the physical presence/absence of an interlocutor and a shared context. The participants in this study were 115 five- to seven-year-old Italian children. We elicited children’s mental state talk through a narrative task. Each child participated under two conditions, face-to-face and telephone story-telling. We coded transcripts to isolate terms referring to mental states. The two total scores, one for mental state talk in the face-to-face conditions and another for the over the phone conditions, correlated. Students used more mental state terms in the telephone conditions than they did in the face-to-face conditions. Children showed more willingness and used more cognitive and moral terms in the telephone conditions than they did in the face-face conditions, with age playing a moderating role. This study confirms the recontextualizing effect of the telephone in eliciting children’s mental state talk