The relation between the pragmatic use of mental state languages in mother-child communication and children’s emotion understanding

• In Event: Poster Session 05
  In Poster Session: PS 05 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

The ability to identify how others are feeling and to understand why they feel the way is one of the significant predictors on later social adaptation (Izard et al., 2001). With a social constructivist perspective, parent-child conversation (i.e., quality of parent’ talk with child) has been underscored for advancements in children’s emotion understanding (Harris, 1994). However, less is known about the association between features of how the languages used by mother align with a child and child emotional understanding. Previous studies that link parent’s conversation to children’s emotion understanding have largely focused on how many emotional terms or emotional explanations were used during discourse (Aznar & Tenenbaum, 2013; Eisenberg, 1999; 2002). The social pragmatic perspective of communication centers on the intended meaning of the sent message (Sung & Hsu, 2014). Given that the appropriate use of language within social situations is an important skill for children to relate with other, this study focused on the pragmatic functions of mother-child communication. The purpose of this study was to examine the contribution of collaborative communication and pragmatic use of mental state languages on 4-year-old children’s emotion understanding.
Participants were 80 children (41 boys, 39 girls) and their mothers. The mother-child communication during picture book reading was observed. Their utterances were transcribed and divided by turn. Coders classified mother-child communication acts as collaborative acts (guide, inform, request, and support) and non-collaborative acts. The mental state languages (emotion and cognition terms) used both by mothers and children were identified and the frequencies were counted. The coders also divided the mental state languages into those used in the contexts of collaborative acts versus non-collaborative acts. Children were tested individually for emotion understanding using the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC; Harris & Pons, 2003).
The children’s support in communication acts and total non-collaborative acts and mothers’ total non-collaborative acts were negatively linked to children’ emotion understanding. Children’s emotional terms and total mental state languages in the contexts of non-collaborative acts were negatively related to their emotion understanding. The mothers’ use of emotion terms and total mental state languages within collaborative acts positively associated with children’s emotion understanding. Moreover, maternal total mental state language used in collaborative acts and children’s total mental state language within non-collaborative acts significantly predicted the children’s emotion understanding, even after controlling the children’s month, language comprehension, and maternal education.
These results underscore the importance of how the mental state language was referred to rather than the simple frequency. This finding will extend the literature on the pragmatic functions of collaborative mother-child communication on children’s emotion understanding development.

Authors

• Ji Young Lee, Sungkyunkwan University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jihyun Sung, Sungkyunkwan University
  Presenting Author