Perspective-marking language supports social cognition in preschoolers

What is it about?

Understanding that people see situations in different ways is a major achievement in children’s social-cognitive development, and in an intervention study with 76 English-speaking three-year-olds, we investigated the role of language in supporting this type of social-cognitive understanding. We found that using sentences indicating perspective like “I thought/knew that the book was in the drawer” when talking about mistakes and disagreement helped three-year-olds develop a more flexible understanding of their own and others’ beliefs.

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Photo by Alexandr Podvalny on Unsplash

Photo by Alexandr Podvalny on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Children’s development of stable abilities to represent and reason about their own and others’ thoughts plays an important role in their social life. Flexible perspective taking allows children to understand mental phenomena such as mistakes, conflicts, pretense and deceit, and in this way it contributes to navigating the social world and building good social relationships. But thoughts are invisible, and we can’t point to them as we would point out physical objects such as a book or a ball, and there is large variation in how early individual children develop a stable and nuanced understanding of the mental world. Our study shows that the grammar we use when we talk to children about mental phenomena supports their developing understanding of and attention to the invisible mental world. In a broader perspective, this study provides evidence for an intimate relationship between linguistic and sociocognitive development in young children. Such a relationship further suggests that if children struggle with language acquisition, their difficulties may not be restricted to language, but have a negative impact on their social wellbeing and development as well.