MOTHER-CHILD PARTICIPATION IN CONVERSATION ABOUT THE PAST - RELATIONSHIPS TO PRESCHOOLERS THEORY OF MIND

Forty 3.5- to 4.5-year-olds discussed 3 past events with their mothers and completed a set of theory of mind tasks indexing their ability to reason about conflicting mental representations and their understandi ng of knowledge. Semipartial correlations and analyses of covariance s howed that children's theory of mind scores were related to their part icipation in memory conversations, independent of age and linguistic s kill. The frequency with which mothers provided new information was re lated to children's theory of mind scores, although mothers' direct re plies to children were generally unrelated to children's understanding of mind. This research takes an important step toward examining the r elevance of theory of mind skills to real-world, social interaction. T he results have implications for explaining the emergence of autobiogr aphical memory.