Home Literacy Environment and Children’s Theory of Mind

• In Event: Theory of mind development and children’s representation of beliefs

Abstract

The home literacy environment (HLE) is linked to theory of mind in early childhood. However, this work has been limited by small sample sizes (N < 60) and narrow definitions of HLE or single items (i.e., book reading frequency; Adrian et al., 2005; Mar et al., 2010). Having a rich HLE across many dimensions (e.g., early exposure to books, access to a greater number of books) may be related to children’s theory of mind because children’s literature is rich with mental state concepts (Dyer et al., 2000). Thus, a greater length of exposure and more frequent interactions with books may provide children with more exposure to mental state vocabulary than in everyday conversation. Children whose parents more frequently discuss mental states tend to have better theory of mind understanding (Tompkins et al., 2018). Thus, this work was guided by the hypothesis that a higher-quality HLE will be significantly correlated with children’s theory of mind understanding.

Parents were recruited for an online study on 4- to 6-year-olds’ HLE. Participants included 516 parents (83% mothers) from 39 US states. Children (53% female) were 80% White and 20% Black, American Indian, Asian, Other, or Multi-Racial; mean age was 4.9 years (SD = 1.09). Parents answered questions about their family including: child and parent age, gender, and race; parent education and family income; and amount of time child spends with parent during the week/weekend. Parents answered a modified Stony Brook Family Reading Survey (Whitehurst, 1993); abbreviated items (12) are included in Table 1 as well as one item about an activity negatively related to children’s theory of mind—time watching TV (Nathanson et al., 2013). Finally, parents self-reported children’s theory of mind understanding with the Children’s Social Understanding Scale (Tahiroglu et al. 2014).

Table 1 provides the bivariate correlations among HLE and theory of mind. Theory of mind was positively correlated with 8 of 11 indicators of a higher-quality HLE and parents’ enjoyment of reading, and was negatively related to time watching TV. The 11 HLE variables were entered into a principal component analysis suppressing values < .4; four components emerged. One component, book exposure (i.e., Component 2 in Table 1) was significantly correlated with theory of mind (r = .48, p = .000).

Finally, book exposure was examined as a predictor of theory of mind in a hierarchical regression controlling for variables significantly correlated with theory of mind: child age, parent education, family income, weekday hours spent with parent, number of children in the family, child gender, and parents’ enjoyment of reading. At step one, the covariates contributed significantly to the regression model, F (7, 498) = 18.80, p = .000 (Table 2). Book exposure uniquely contributed to theory of mind and explained an additional 12% in variance in theory of mind after entering the covariates, F (1, 497) = 85.66, p = .000.

These results suggest that a longer and more varied exposure to books is linked to children’s theory of mind, perhaps providing greater exposure to character mental states.

Author

• Virginia L Tompkins, The Ohio State University at Lima
  Presenting Author