“…allora capì di essere stato ingannato”. Analisi del linguaggio psicologico nelle narrazioni infantili e teoria della mente

“…So he understood he has been deceived”: language of mind in children’s narratives and theory of mind. The present research links to those studies which take language of mind as an indicator of child’s knowledge about other people’s mind and in particular narratives as a useful instruments in the evaluation of the child’s mind skills. The aim is to verify the relation between theory of mind and language of mind in narratives and their developmental trend from kindergarten to primary school. 112 children (50 attending last year in kindergarten and 62 attending 1st grade in primary school) were given a false belief task and a language of mind task. Results show a significant relation between theory of mind and language of mind, suggesting that knowledge of mental states is an important factor underlying both competences. As far as developmental trend is concerned, the ability in the task of false-belief do not significantly rises from kindergarten to primary school, while language of mind in narratives shows a significant increase, supporting the multi-componential nature of the knowledge of mind.