Child Development, January/February 2008, Volume 79, Number 1, Pages 201 – 216

Content or Connectedness? Mother – Child Talk and

Early Social Understanding
Rosie Ensor and Claire Hughes
University of Cambridge

Despite much research into individual differences in social understanding among preschoolers, little is known
about corresponding individual differences within younger children. Likewise, although studies of preschoolers
highlight the importance of mental-state references, other aspects of talk have received less attention. The current
study involved 120 families with 2-year-olds; video-based transcripts of observations of family interaction were
coded for quantity, connectedness, and content of mothers’ and children’s talk. At 2, 3, and 4 years of age, children
completed social understanding and verbal ability tests. Mothers’ connected turns and mental-state reference
within connected turns showed independent associations with children’s social understanding (as did children’s
mental-state references, both overall and within connected turns). Connected conversations provide a fertile
context for children’s developing social understanding.

Theory of mind is the ability to impute mental states in
order to predict and explain human behavior, that is,
the use of beliefs and feelings as a lens on human
action. Early research focused on developmental mile-
stones in children’s understanding of false beliefs (see
Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001 for a meta-analysis),
but the last decade has seen growing interest in the
origins of individual differences in false belief compre-
hension (Hughes et al., 2005; Repacholi & Slaughter,
2003). The current study contributes to this endeavor
by addressing two hitherto neglected topics. First,
although progress has been made in identifying
precursors of false belief understanding (Meltzoff,
Gopnik, & Repacholi, 1999; Wellman, Phillips, &
Rodriguez, 2000), the correlates of early individual
differences in social understanding have yet to be
explored. Second, studies that document associations
between preschoolers’ false belief comprehension and
family conversations typically focus on the content of
such speech (in particular, references to mental states).
As a result, other aspects of family talk (e.g., quantity
and quality) have received much less research atten-
tion. The current study examines these two issues.
Next, we outline the theoretical background to each of
these two areas in turn.
Early Social Understanding
Most children do not pass standard false belief
tasks (commonly viewed as the litmus test of theory of
mind) until the age of 4 years (Wellman et al., 2001).
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Rosie Ensor, Centre for Family Research, Free School Lane,
Cambridge, CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. Electronic mail may be
sent to rad35@cam.ac.uk.
However, in their everyday social interactions, chil-
dren as young as 2 years engage in deception and
trickery (Newton, Reddy, & Bull, 2000) and blame
others for their own transgressions (Dunn, 1988;
Wilson, Smith, & Ross, 2003). Rather than being
simple behavioral routines to achieve desired and
avoid undesired outcomes, such behaviors appear to
reflect young children’s deliberate attempts to create
false beliefs in others (Newton et al., 2000). If so,
children’s poor performance on false belief tasks may
reflect the significant peripheral linguistic and infor-
mation-processing demands of such tasks (Bloom &
German, 2000; Leslie & Polizzi, 1998; Siegal & Beattie,
1991). In line with this proposition, Clements and
Perner (1994) found that more than 90% of 3-year-olds
who failed an unexpected location false belief task
nevertheless looked at the correct location (see also
Garnham & Ruffman, 2001); moreover, 3-year-olds
are more likely to succeed on false belief tasks that
have improved ecological validity (Cassidy, 1998;
Chandler, Fritz, & Hala, 1989; Hala & Chandler,
1996; Hala, Chandler, & Fritz, 1991; Wimmer &
Perner, 1983). Together, these findings suggest that
3-year-olds have an implicit understanding of false
beliefs.
Other important elements of children’s early social
understanding include the detection of simple emo-
tions and the recognition of their causes. By 18
months, children can recognize that someone might
want something that they themselves do not want
(Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997) and can predict how
someone else will feel if that person’s desire is
# 2008, Copyright the Author(s)
Journal Compilation # 2008, Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.
All rights reserved. 0009-3920/2008/7901-0014
202 Ensor and Hughes
satisfied or not satisfied (Wellman & Banerjee, 1991).
By the age of 2 – 3 years, children can identify how
someone will feel, even in situations where they
would probably feel differently (Denham, 1986; Well-
man & Banerjee, 1991). Reflecting these findings, in
this study, we view early social understanding as
a broad theoretical construct that includes under-
standing of both beliefs and emotions.
Content and Connectedness of Conversation
Four distinct areas of research highlight the
importance of conversation for individual differences
in children’s social understanding. First, a seminal
series of studies by Dunn and colleagues revealed that
children from families characterized by high frequen-
cies of causal talk and/or talk about feelings were
more likely than their peers to succeed on false belief
and emotion understanding tasks 7 months later
(Dunn, Brown, & Beardsall, 1991; Dunn, Brown,
Slomkowski, Tesla, & Youngblade, 1991). Subsequent
longitudinal studies have shown that talk about
mental states with both friends (Hughes & Dunn,
1998) and mothers (Ruffman, Slade, & Crowe, 2002)
predict improvements in children’s false belief com-
prehension. Second, training studies highlight the
importance of explanation within conversations,
rather than presentation of counterevidence, for
children’s success on false belief tasks (Appleton &
Reddy, 1996; Lohmann & Tomasello, 2003). Third,
a recent large-scale study (involving 1,116 pairs of
5-year-old twins) showed that shared environmental
factors had a substantial influence on individual differ-
ences in children’s understanding of false beliefs;
bivariate model-fitting analyses showed that these
factors had a common impact on children’s verbal
ability (Hughes et al., 2005). In other words, environ-
mental influences upon children’s early language skills,
such as the quantity (Clarke-Stewart, 1973; Hart &
Risley, 1992, 1995; Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer,
& Lyons, 1991) and quality (Tomasello & Barton, 1994;
Tomasello & Farrar, 1986; Tomasello & Todd, 1983) of
family talk, also appear likely to influence children’s
false belief comprehension. Fourth, several studies
demonstrate that, compared with native-signing deaf
children, late-signing deaf children (i.e., deaf children
born to hearing parents) show marked delays in false
belief understanding, suggesting that restricted family
conversations can delay false belief comprehension
(Peterson, 2002, 2004; Peterson & Siegal, 1995, 2000;
Woolfe, Want, & Siegal, 2002).
Why should conversations matter for children’s
social understanding? Two distinct mechanisms have
been proposed: First, the acquisition of the vocabu-
lary necessary for labeling mental states enables
children to represent and reflect on abstract mental-
state concepts (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995; Olson, 1988).
From this perspective, individual differences in social
understanding are closely tied to variation in child-
ren’s own language skills. Second, conversations
provide contexts in which children are confronted
with the differences between others’ and their own
states of mind (Nelson, 2005); here, the origins of
individual differences in children’s social under-
standing are intrinsically social. What is not yet clear,
however, is the features of conversation that are
particularly important for children’s early social
understanding. For example, do conversational refer-
ences to specific types of mental states differ in
importance? In the only relevant study to include
experimental tasks, Ruffman et al. (2002) found that
an aggregate of mothers’ talk about mental states was
the most consistent correlate of children’s perfor-
mance on false belief tasks. However, given that
references to mental states are relatively infrequent,
this finding may reflect the difficulty of conducting
a fine-grained analysis without extended conversa-
tional excerpts. For example, the detailed study of
Bartsch and Wellman (1995) involving lengthy obser-
vations of a small number (4 – 10) of children revealed
that mothers’ talk about desires predicted pre-
schoolers’ later talk about cognitions more strongly
than did mothers’ talk about cognitions (see also
Ruffman et al., 2002). In contrast, Jenkins, Turrell,
Kogushi, Lollis, and Ross (2003) found that family talk
about cognitions (but not desires) predicted 4-year-
old children’s talk about cognitions. This finding is
consistent with theoretical accounts that emphasize
the mind-to-world fit of cognitions (Searle, 1983). In
other words, compared with references to desires,
references to cognitions are more likely to highlight
the subjective nature of mental states.
Studies of normative individual differences in
children’s understanding of false beliefs have, as
indicated above, focused heavily on the literal content
of family talk. This is surprising because a core tenet of
theoretical analyses of conversation is that the literal
content of an utterance does not necessarily reveal the
speaker’s meaning. That is, according to Grice (1975),
even in ordinary conversational exchanges, interloc-
utors must navigate their way through not only
conventional implicatures (where there is a clear
and mutually understood correspondence between
the ordinary and implicated meanings of words) but
also conversational implicatures (for which the mean-
ing of the utterance depends on shared understand-
ing of conversational principles; de Rosnay &
Hughes, 2006). In other words, beyond asking, ‘‘what

is being talked about?’’ it is important also to ask,
‘‘how is it being talked about?’’ (Harrist & Waugh,
2002). We propose that one special feature of the
‘‘how’’ is the alignment of one interlocutor to another
(Fogel, 1993). We term this alignment ‘‘connected-
ness’’ and, following the example of Dunn and
colleagues (Dunn & Brophy, 2005; Dunn & Cutting,
1999; Slomkowski & Dunn, 1996), employ a simple
operational definition: the frequency with which each
speaker’s utterances are semantically related to
another speaker’s prior utterance (Gottman, 1983).
In this way, the construct of connectedness provides
an index of how well interlocutors are tuned in to each
other’s talk (Bruner, 1983). Findings from two sepa-
rate studies show that children who perform well on
false belief tasks also engage in frequent and extensive
connected conversations with their friends (Dunn &
Cutting, 1999; Slomkowski & Dunn, 1996). Individual
differences in the connectedness of mother – child
conversations are also striking (Dunn, 1993) and, in
a study of ‘‘hard-to-manage’’ preschoolers, Dunn and
Brophy (2005) found that low frequencies of mother –
child connected conversations were related to poor
false belief understanding.
Despite the promise of the previously described
early findings, associations between connectedness of
conversations and children’s social understanding
have been relatively little researched. This is surpris-
ing given the likely overlap between mental-state and
connected talk; it seems probable that references to
mental states occur predominantly during connected
conversations. If so, two possibilities arise. First,
associations between mental-state references and
social understanding may actually reflect overlap-
ping relations with connectedness. The independence
of mental-state and connected talk as correlates of
social understanding, however, has yet to be estab-
lished. Second, children’s emerging social under-
standing may be particularly strongly associated
with references to mental states that occur within
connected conversations. That is, how mental states
are referred to may be more important than their
simple frequency. A similar moderation effect has
been found for mother – child causal talk: Children
whose mothers used causal talk chiefly during dis-
putes did poorly on subsequent assessments of emo-
tion understanding, whereas children whose
mothers’ causal talk was within the context of shared
play, comforting or joking were more successful on
the later emotion understanding tests (Dunn &
Brown, 1993). To assess their relative independence
and interplay, we examine both mother – child men-
tal-state and connected talks in relation to children’s
concurrent and later social understanding.
Mother – Child Talk and Early Social Understanding 203
The present study involved a socially diverse sam-
ple of 120 families with 2-year-olds, filmed during their
everyday routines. Mothers’ and children’s utterance
were then transcribed and coded; children completed
social understanding tasks at ages of 2, 3, and 4 years.
The data were used, in sum, to address three questions.
First, are mothers and children particularly likely to
refer to desires, cognitions and/or emotions within
connected utterances? Second, do mothers’ and child-
ren’s mental-state references and connected turns
show independent relations with children’s social
understanding? Third, does connectedness moderate
associations between mothers’ and children’s mental-
state references and children’s social understanding?
Method
Recruitment and Participants
A socially diverse sample was recruited via
mother – toddler groups in low-income neighborhoods
and support groups for mothers in Cambridge, UK.
Core inclusion criteria included toddlers aged between
24 and 36 months at the first wave of data collection and
English as a home language. Of the 192 eligible
families, 140 (73%) gave informed consent and took
part in the first wave of the study; of these, 120 (75 boys
and 45 girls) participated fully at all three study time
points. Reflecting the local population, all but four of
the children were Caucasian. With regard to parental
occupation, 44% of the heads of households were
in professional/managerial occupations, 26% were in
skilled nonmanual occupations, and 30% were in
manual occupations or unemployed. With regard to
parental education, 29% of mothers and 17% of fathers
had college degrees, 34% of mothers and 15% of fathers
had A-levels (equivalent to high school diploma), 25%
of mothers and 32% of fathers had General Certificates
of Secondary Education (GCSEs) or equivalent, and
12% of mothers and 35% of fathers had no educational
qualifications. In terms of family structure, 22% of
mothers were lone parents and 11% of the children
were singletons, 54% had one sibling, 21% had two
siblings, 10% had three siblings, and 4% had four or
five siblings (93% of all siblings were older siblings).
Procedures
At the first two time points (M ages for target
children 5 2.38 years, SD 5 32 days at Time 1 and 3.45
years, SD 5 35 days at Time 2), two researchers visited
each family for 2 hr (typically on a weekday evening).
During each visit, mothers completed a question-
naire-based interview with one researcher, while
204 Ensor and Hughes
target children completed false belief and emotion
understanding tasks with the other researcher (who
also filmed them playing with a sibling). At the end of
the visit, families were observed for 30 min during
meal preparation and/or a meal; researchers fol-
lowed the target child and did not participate in and
responded as little as possible to family interaction.
Families received £20 as a token of thanks for their
time. Following the home visits, the videos were
transcribed professionally. Researchers then checked
that the speakers and addressees, the division of
speech into turns, and the content of speech were
correct and added any nonverbal contextual informa-
tion needed to understand the speech.
Approximately 6 weeks after the home visit (Time
1 M interval 5 39 days, SD 5 32 days, range 5 26 – 95
days; Time 2 M interval 5 39 days, SD 5 35 days,
range 5 19 – 92 days), mother – toddler dyads visited
the lab in pairs for a 2-hr session. During this visit,
each child completed verbal ability assessments.
Taxis/parking refunds were provided for all families,
as well as a video of the visit. At the third time point
(M age of target children at Time 3 5 4.19 years, SD 5
37 days), researchers visited each child at play group
or nursery school for 2 hr. During this visit, each child
completed false belief and emotion understanding
tasks as well as a verbal ability assessment; families
received a DVD of the visit.
Observational Coding
Time 1 transcripts (i.e., when the target children were
2 years old) were coded using the scheme designed by
Brown, Donelan-McCall, and Dunn (1996), for refer-
ences to three categories of mental states: cognitions,
desires, and feelings. References to cognitive states
included terms used to denote thoughts, memories, or
knowledge of the mother, child, or a third party. The
most common cognitive terms recorded were think,
know, forgot, mean, and variations. Other cognitive terms
that occurred were assure, believe, concentrate, distract,
expect, figure, guess, idea, ignore, imagine, interest, learn,
pretend, recognize, trust, understand, wonder, and varia-
tions. The desire terms observed were fancy, keen, hope,
want, wish, would like, would love, and variations com-
monly used to capture both desires and goals. For
example, want was coded when the term referred to
a goal-directed behavior. References to feelings
included those that referred to an emotional state. The
feeling terms noted were cross, disgust, enjoy, excited, fed
up, frightened, fun, grumpy, happy, like, love, pleased, proud,
scared, surprise, upset, worried, and variations. For exam-
ple, like was only coded when the term referred to
a state of enjoyment and not when it indicated ‘‘to want
to have.’’ References to mental states that were conver-
sational, repetitive (within an utterance), and imitative
were excluded.
The transcripts were divided into conversational
turns; a turn was defined as the utterances of one
speaker bounded by another speaker’s utterances
(Shatz & Gelman, 1973) or a significant silence (usually
5 s or more). Adopting procedures from previous
studies (e.g., Dunn & Cutting, 1999), each conversa-
tional turn that mothers directed to the target child was
assigned to one of the following five quality codes:
1. Connected: Speaker’s utterance is semantically
related to the other interlocutor’s previous turn.
2. Initiation: Speaker initiates a new topic that
is both unrelated to the other interlocutor’s
previous turn and successful in eliciting
a semantically related response from the other
interlocutor.
3. Failed: Speaker’s turn is directed (either explic-
itly or implicitly) to the other interlocutor but
fails to elicit a semantically related response.
4. Conflict: Speaker’s utterance includes a prohibi-
tion, threat, or insult.
5. Unclear: Speaker’s utterance was inaudible and,
thus, is not transcribed sufficiently to code.
A trumping system was used such that turns that
could be categorized as either conflict or connected
were always coded as connected.
In previous studies, the quality of interaction has
also been indexed by the length of connected epi-
sodes, that is, the average number of turns in each
connected conversation (Slomkowski & Dunn, 1996)
or the number of connected conversations that con-
tinued for at least three turns (Dunn & Cutting, 1999).
These approaches were not adopted in the current
study; instead (as in one other study—Brophy &
Dunn, 2002), the quality of each turn (i.e., con-
nected/initiatory/failed/conflictual/unclear) was
coded. Such turn-based coding has at least two
advantages: First, the problem of reliably identifying
the point where one connected conversation ends and
another begins is circumvented; second, the quality of
each turn containing a mental-state reference can be
calculated, providing indices of the frequencies of
connected, initiatory, failed, and conflictual turns con-
taining references to desires, cognitions, and emotions.
Table 1 shows a conversational excerpt, coded for
quantity, content, and quality. Turns 1 and 4 were
coded as failed because the child did not respond to
the mother’s utterances. Turn 2 was coded as an
initiation because the child responds to the mother’s
second utterance. Turn 3 could have been coded as

Table 1
Coding of Example Conversational Excerpt
No. turns
1. M: Would you like a slice of ham now or will you wait?
2. M: Do you want a slice of ham?
3. C: No. I bumped my nose
4. M: You’re so tired
5. C: Piglet down
6. C: Bumped my nose
7. M: You did bump your nose didn’t you?
But I think it’s all better now though, isn’t it?
Note. C5child; M5mother.
connected (as the child replied to the mother’s ques-
tion) or failed (as the mother did not respond to the
child’s comment about her nose). As connected
trumps all other codes, turn 3 was coded as con-
nected. Turn 5 is coded as failed because the mother
did not reply to the child’s comment about piglet. The
mother responded to the child’s second comment
about her nose; therefore, Turn 6 was coded as an
initiation and Turn 7 was coded as connected.
As part of a summer research internship, a psychol-
ogy undergraduate student was trained and then inde-
pendently coded 20% of transcripts. Interrater
agreement with the first author was established using
Cohen’s kappa and was excellent for both references to
mental states (j 5 .86) and quality of utterances (j 5 .97).
Experimental Tasks
At ages 2, 3, and 4 years, children completed tasks
tapping simple skills of deception and awareness of
mistaken beliefs. We first describe the tasks that were
administered at all three time points: a penny hiding
deception game, a picture book false belief task, and an
emotion understanding (identification and perspective
taking) puppet game. Next, we describe an object
transfer false belief task given at ages 3 and 4 years
and a deceptive content false belief task given at age 3
years that, because of time constraints in the school/
nursery visits, could not be included at age 4 years.
Tasks were presented in a counterbalanced order.
Deception (Hughes, 1998). In this penny hiding
game, the researcher hides a coin behind her back
and, bringing both hands forward with the coin
concealed in one hand, asks the child to guess which
hand has the coin. After two more display trials, the
researcher invites the child to hide the coin. For each
of the following three test trials, one point is awarded
for each of the following: hiding both hands behind
Mother – Child Talk and Early Social Understanding 205
Quantity
No. words Content Quality (of turn)
1 12 Desire reference Failed
2 7 Desire reference Initiation
1 5 — Connected
3 4 — Failed
2 2 — Failed
3 3 — Initiation
4 20 Cognitive reference Connected
back, bringing both hands forward, keeping hand
closed, and keeping coin hidden. Scores for this task
have a possible range of 0 – 12 points.
Picture book false belief (Hughes, 1998). The standard
false belief task was made more engaging by using
peep-through picture books with deceptive elements
(e.g., what appears to be an eye peeping through
a hole in the page turns out to be a spot on a snake’s
back; what looks like an orange turns out to be the
setting sun). The same book (Moerbeek, 1994) was
used at 2 and 4 years of age; at 3 years of age a differ-
ent book (Balas, 2003) was used to ensure that the
deceptive element was not affected by children’s
memories of the previous testing session. At each
time point, children were asked two forced-choice test
questions tapping memory for own false belief,
‘‘Before we turned the page, what did you think this
would be, an eye or a spot?’’ and prediction of other’s
false belief, ‘‘Look, this is Charlie (show puppet).
Charlie has never seen this book before. If we show
him this picture, what will he think it is, an eye or
a spot?’’ We also asked two corresponding forced-
choice reality control questions, ‘‘What is it really, an
eye or a spot?’’ Children were credited with success
on the test questions only if they also passed the
corresponding reality control question. Possible
scores on these tasks range from 0 to 2 points.
Emotion understanding (Denham, 1986). In this task,
a puppet (Johnny for boys, Nancy for girls) with
a blank face and four felt faces portraying happy,
sad, angry, and scared expressions was used. In the
emotion labeling subtask, children were asked to
name how the puppet felt when each face was placed
in turn on the puppet; children were then told how
Johnny or Nancy felt and asked to choose the appro-
priate face. Vignettes (8 at age 2 years of age; 16 at ages
of 3 and 4 years) associated with feelings of happiness,
sadness, anger, or fear were then enacted (2 of each
206 Ensor and Hughes
type at 2 years of age; 4 of each type at 3 and 4 years of
age) with matching affective tone. In 8 vignettes, the
puppet’s emotions reflect what most children typi-
cally feel in a given situation. In the other 8 vignettes,
the puppet’s emotion differed from the emotion that
the mother had stated her child would typically
express in that situation. Children were asked to
choose the face that matched how the puppet was
feeling in each vignette. Fully correct responses
received 2 points, whereas responses correct in
valence but not specific emotion (e.g., calling the
angry face ‘‘sad’’) received 1 point. This task had
a possible range of 0 – 24 points at 2 years of age and
0 – 42 points at 3 and 4 years of age.
Object transfer false belief task. This task was given at
3 and 4 years of age, using different characters and
props at each time point. At 3 years of age, the story
involved two well-known characters (Noddy and Big
Ears); props for this included toy figures, a set of
miniature knives and forks, and a miniature drawer
and pot (with lid). At 4 years of age, the story was the
classic Sally – Ann scenario (Wimmer & Perner, 1983),
enacted with props (two dolls, a basket, a box, and
a very small ball). In the Noddy story, Big Ears is doing
the washing up and tidies the cutlery away in the pot
before going out. Noddy then appears and moves the
cutlery into the drawer before also leaving. Big Ears
then reappears, in need of the cutlery. In the Sally –
Ann story, Sally has a ball, which she places in a basket
before going out. In her absence, Ann takes the ball out
to play with it and replaces it in the box, before also
leaving. Sally returns to the scene, wanting to play
with the ball. For each story, children were asked two
test questions: (a) prediction of search behavior,
‘‘Where will Noddy/Sally look for the knives/ball?’’
and (b) belief-based explanation, ‘‘Why did Noddy/
Sally look there?’’ Children were asked both a memory
control question, ‘‘Where did Noddy/Sally put the
knives/ball first of all?’’ and a reality control question,
‘‘Where are they/is really?’’ Children are credited
with success on the test questions only if they also
respond to the reality control question—possible
scores on this task range from 0 to 2 points.
Deceptive contents false belief task. In this task, given
at the age of 3 years only, children are shown a pro-
totypical container (an egg box) and a plain tube and
asked which they think contains an egg. The boxes are
then opened to reveal a realistic model egg in the plain
tube. They are then asked to recall their false belief,
‘‘Before we looked, which box did you think had an
egg inside?’’ and a reality control question, ‘‘Which
box really has an egg inside?’’ Next, they are intro-
duced to a granny doll, who wants to make a cake and
needs some eggs. The granny doll ‘‘walks’’ to the egg
box, and children are asked to explain why she’s
looking in that box, as well as a second reality control
question. Children are required to pass the corre-
sponding reality control questions in order to receive
credit on each of these two test questions—possible
scores on this task range from 0 to 2 points.
Verbal Ability Assessments
A subtest from the British abilities scales (Elliott,
Murray, & Pearson, 1983) was used to assess child-
ren’s verbal comprehension at 2 and 3 years of age.
Standard scoring procedures were applied and gave
a possible range of 0 – 27. The British picture vocab-
ulary scale (Dunn, 1997) was used to assess children’s
verbal comprehension at the age of 4 years.
Results
We begin by describing the construction of the aggre-
gate measures of social understanding and conversa-
tion. We then report preliminary analyses concerning
(a) developmental change, stability of individual
differences, and sex differences in children’s social
understanding and (b) associations between the social
understanding aggregate measures and children’s
verbal ability, mothers’ education, and the number
of mothers’ and children’s utterances. In the main
Results section, we present analyses for each of our
study questions in turn. The first question concerns
whether mothers and children are particularly likely
to refer to desires, cognitions, and/or emotions within
connected utterances. We address this question in two
ways: by using repeated measures analysis of covari-
ance (ANCOVA) and by categorizing mothers and
children according to whether or not they referred to
mental states preferentially within connected turns.
The second question concerns whether or not moth-
ers’ and children’s mental-state references and con-
nected turns are each significant, and independent,
predictors of individual differences in children’s
social understanding. The third question concerns
whether or not connectedness moderates associations
between mothers’ and children’s mental-state refer-
ences and children’s social understanding. These
latter two questions are addressed using separate
correlations and hierarchical regression analyses.
Data Reduction
To achieve comparable measures of children’s
social understanding at all three time points, we
averaged standardized scores on the false belief,
 Mother – Child Talk and Early Social Understanding 207

emotion understanding and deception tasks. Scores
on the false belief, emotion understanding, and
deception tasks were significantly correlated at 2
years of age, rmean(120) 5 .36, rmin(120) 5 .29, rmax(120)
5 .40, p , .01; and at 3 years of age, rmean(120) 5 .35,
rmin(120) 5 .26, rmax(120) 5 .43, p , .01. At 4 years of
age, although there were significant correlations
between scores on the false belief and emotion under-
standing tasks, r(120) 5 .20, p , .05 and between the
scores on emotion understanding and deception
tasks, r(120) 5 .43, p , .01, false belief and deception
scores were not significantly correlated, r(120) 5 .06,
ns. The aggregates showed modest internal consis-
tency at 2 years of age, Cronbach’s a 5 .63, and good
internal consistency at 3 and 4 years of age, Cron-
bach’s a 5 .73, for both.
Turning to mother – child talk, we first indexed the
quantity of mothers’ and children’s talk by calculating
the number and mean length of mother to child turns
and child to mother turns. Next, we indexed the
quality of their talk by calculating the frequencies of
connected, initiatory, failed, and conflictual turns.
Third, we indexed the content of mother – child talk
by calculating the frequencies of references to desires,
cognitions, and emotions. Table 2 presents raw scores
for each of these measures. Given the relative infre-
quency of children’s references to cognitions, desires,
and emotion, we adopted overall frequencies of
children’s mental-state references for our analyses.
In order to address the third study hypothesis
(concerning whether the associations between
mental-state references and social understanding are
restricted to connected conversations), we used
Bespoke Software (Ensor, 2005) to marry the quality
and content codes. This enabled us to calculate the
frequencies of mothers’ and children’s mental-state
references within connected, initiatory, failed, and
conflictual turns. Note that both mothers and children
made too few references to desires, cognitions, and
emotions to calculate the frequency with which each

Table 2
Descriptive Statistics for Measures of Cognition and Talk (Proportions Are Shown in Parentheses)

Measure M SD Range

Mothers Number of turns 66.84 48.38 5 – 256

Mean length of turns 7.61 2.50 1.89 – 14.27
Desire reference 9.46 (.16) 7.71 (.12) 0 – 40 (.00 – .70)
Cognitive references 4.16 (.06) 4.49 (.06) 0 – 20 (.00 – .29)
Emotion references 1.43 (.02) 1.97 (.03) 0 – 12 (.00 – .12)
Connected turns 34.89 (.43) 33.39 (.20) 0 – 173 (.00 – .88)
Initiatory turns 8.70 (.14) 6.33 (.07) 0 – 31 (.00 – .50)
Failed turns 21.36 (.40) 13.63 (.25) 0 – 78 (.00 – 1.00)
Conflictual turns 3.43 (.09) 4.14 (.08) 0 – 23 (.00 – .40)
Children Number of turns 42.25 37.45 0 – 209
Mean length of turns 2.67 1.02 0 – 5.40
Desire references 2.79 (.08) 4.28 (.09) 0 – 22 (.00 – .46)
Cognitive references 0.29 (.01) 0.77 (.02) 0 – 5 (.00 – .10)
Emotion references 0.42 (.01) 0.91 (.03) 0 – 4 (.00 – .23)
Connected turns 27.31 (.60) 26.12 (.20) 0 – 135 (.00 – 1.00)
Initiatory turns 7.42 (.18) 8.47 (.12) 0 – 52 (.00 – .67)
Failed turns 3.32 (.12) 4.24 (.15) 0 – 29 (.00 – .80)
Conflictual turns .59 (.07) 1.12 (.10) 0 – 6 (.00 – .52)
Age 2 verbal comprehension 15.44 5.78 0 – 25
Age 2 deception 3.95 3.52 0 – 12
Age 2 false belief 0.66 0.77 0–2
Age 2 emotion understanding 10.74 10.12 0 – 26
Age 3 verbal comprehension 21.48 3.50 10 – 27
Age 3 deception 7.88 3.43 0 – 12
Age 3 false belief 1.66 1.43 0–4
Age 3 emotion understanding 30.69 10.12 9 – 47
Age 4 verbal comprehension 35.30 11.31 11 – 72
Age 4 deception 9.85 2.75 0 – 12
Age 4 false belief 1.65 1.42 0–4
Age 4 emotion understanding 40.85 7.08 4 – 48
208 Ensor and Hughes
occurred within connected, initiatory, failed, and
conflictual turns. All measures of talk were log trans-
formed before conducting correlation and regression
analyses, in order to reduce any effects of the positive
skew that were apparent in the raw data.
Preliminary Analyses
Before describing associations between children’s
social understanding aggregates (described previ-
ously) and children’s verbal comprehension, mater-
nal education, and the number of mothers’ and
children’s turns, we summarize findings concerning
developmental change, stability of individual differ-
ences, and sex differences in children’s social under-
standing. As reported elsewhere (Hughes & Ensor,
2007), children improved significantly in their perfor-
mance on false belief tasks over the three time points;
in addition, individual differences in children’s false
belief task performance were significantly correlated.
Girls achieved higher social understanding scores
than boys at 2 years of age, t(120) 5 1.96, p 5 .05,
and 3, t(120) 5 1.78, p , .10. However, there were no
sex differences in any other study measure, t(120) ,
1.54, ns, and girls and boys showed similar patterns of
correlations. To simplify analyses, we report findings
for the whole sample.
The number of children’s turns was significantly
correlated with children’s age 2 social understanding,
r(120) 5 .18, p , .05, but not with social understanding
at 3 or 4 years of age, r(120)
.07, ns. In addition, the
number of mothers’ turns was not significantly cor-
related with children’s social understanding at any
age, r(120)
.15, ns. Maternal education was signifi-
cantly correlated with children’s social understand-
ing, r(120)  .18, p , .05. Finally, children’s verbal
comprehension was significantly correlated with
social understanding, both concurrently, r(120) 
.63, p , .01, and longitudinally, r(120)  .46, p , 01.
Therefore, we controlled for the effects of age 2 social
understanding, age 4 verbal comprehension, and
maternal education in subsequent regression analy-
ses. In addition, to ensure comparability with prior
studies that have used proportional measures of talk,
these analyses also controlled for any effects of the
number of mother and child turns.
Do Mental-State References Occur in Connected,
Initiatory, Failed, or Conflictual Turns?
Our first hypothesis was that both mothers and
children would be especially likely to refer to mental
states within connected (as opposed to failed or
conflictual) turns. To assess this hypothesis, we used
two repeated measures ANCOVAs, each with two
within-subject factors: content (three levels: desire,
cognitive, and emotion references) and quality (four
levels: connected, initiatory, failed, and conflictual
turns). The number of mothers’ or children’s turns
was covaried in each respective analysis.
Main effects. Main effects of content of talk were
found for both children, F(2, 117) 5 50.01, p , .001,
and mothers, F(2, 117) 5 115.04, p , .001. Separate
paired-samples t tests showed that children referred
to desires significantly more frequently than to either
cognitions, t(120) 5 6.39, p , .001, or emotions, t(120)
5 6.39, p , .001. Children referred with similar
frequency to cognitions and emotions, t(120) 5 1.30,
ns. Mothers also referred to desires significantly more
frequently than to either cognitions, t(120) 5 8.42,
p , .001, or emotions, t(120) 5 11.46, p , .001. Mothers
referred to cognitions significantly more frequently
than to emotions, t(120) 5 5.70, p , .001.
Main effects of quality of talk were found for both
children, F(3, 116) 5 46.01, p , .001, and mothers,
F(3, 116) 5 56.99, p , .001. Children’s utterances were
significantly more likely to be connected than initia-
tory, t(120) 5 10.65, p , .001; failed, t(120) 5 10.57,
p , .001; or conflictual, t(120) 5 10.72, p , .001. In
addition, children’s utterances were significantly
more likely to be initiations than failed, t(120) 5
6.06, p , .001, or conflictual, t(120) 5 6.12, p , .001.
Children’s turns were equally likely to be failed or
conflictual, t(120) 5 .59, ns. Likewise, mothers’ utter-
ances were significantly more likely to be connected
than initiatory, t(120) 5 9.77, p , .001; failed, t(120) 5
4.12, p , .001; or conflictual, t(120) 5 10.04, p , .001.
Mothers’ utterances were also significantly more
likely to be initiations than failed, t(120) 5 11.23, p ,
.001, or conflictual, t(120) 5 11.50, p , .001. Mothers’
turns were significantly more likely to be failed than
conflictual, t(120) 5 12.75, p , .001.
Interaction effects. Most importantly, the interaction
between quality and content was significant for both
mothers, F(6, 113) 5 26.23, p , .001, and children,
F(6, 113) 5 25.09, p , .001. As shown in Table 3,
mothers and children both appeared more likely to
refer to desires, cognitions, and emotions within
connected utterances than within initiatory, failed,
or conflictual turns. To explore this interaction further,
we identified children and mothers who referred to
desires/cognitions/emotions preferentially within
connected turns if the proportion of connected turns
that included references to desires/cognitions/emo-
tions was greater than the proportion of initiatory,
failed, and conflictual turns that included references
to desires/cognitions/emotions. The number of chil-
dren who showed such preferential use was 59 for
 Mother – Child Talk and Early Social Understanding 209

Table 3 ences to desires and cognitions occurred more fre-

Mothers and Children Refer to Desires, Cognitions, and Emotions More quently within connected turns than within initiatory,
Frequently Within Connected Than Within Initiatory, Failed, or Conflic- failed, and conflictual utterances.
tual Turns

M Is Children’s Social Understanding Associated With Both

Mental-State and Connected Talk?
Content Quality Mothers Children
Our second study hypothesis was that mothers’
Desire references Connected 4.35 1.77
and children’s mental-state references and connected
Initiation 2.02 0.77
turns would each be significant and independ-
Failed 2.90 0.31
Conflict 0.27 0.04
ent predictors of children’s social understanding
Cognitive references Connected 2.07 0.21 at 4 years of age. Note that the patterns of
Initiation 0.44 0.04 correlations, shown in Table 4 were very similar
Failed 0.91 0.05 for false belief and emotion understanding when
Conflict 0.17 0.00 examined separately. To simplify analyses (and for
Emotion references Connected 0.63 0.31 reasons of space), we focus on the overall measures
Initiation 0.20 0.04 of social understanding.
Failed 0.47 0.04 Correlations: Mental-state references. Mothers’ cog-
Conflict 0.08 0.02 nitive references were significantly correlated with
children’s social understanding at 2, 3 and 4 years of
age, r(120)  .34, p , .01, even when children’s
concurrent verbal comprehension scores were par-
desire terms, 10 for cognitive terms, and 13 for tialed, r(120)  .27, p , .01. In contrast, mothers’ desire
emotion terms (i.e., 49%, 8%, and 11%). Correspond- and emotion references were not significantly corre-
ing numbers for mothers were 109, 76, and 56 (i.e., lated with children’s social understanding at any age,
91%, 63%, and 47%). Moreover, 75 mothers referred r(120)
.07, ns; note the significant contrasts in
preferentially to both cognitions and desires within strength of correlations between cognitive versus
connected turns (11 mothers did not refer preferen- desire/emotion references and social understanding,
tially to either cognitions or desires within connected z(120) . 2.17, p , .05. Children’s mental-state refer-
turns and 34 mothers referred preferentially to either ences (recall that children’s references to cognitive,
desires or cognitions within connected turns): McNe- desire, and emotion terms, because of their relative
mar (1, 119) 5 29.26, p , .001. In sum, the quality and infrequency, were combined) were significantly cor-
content of mothers’ talk co-occurred, such that refer- related with social understanding at 2, 3, and 4 years

Table 4
Correlations Between the Content and Quality of Talk and Children’s Social Understanding

Age 2 Age 3 Age 4

Social False belief Emotion Social False belief Emotion Social False belief Emotion

Mothers’ Desires references .07 .01 .07 .00 .02 .00 .06 .02 .07
Cognitive references .34** .30** .34** .34** .32** .33** .43** .33** .37**
Emotion references .06 .01 .06 .06 .02 .07 .04 .03 .04
Connected turns .33** .36** .33** .28** .27** .27** .39** .33** .32**
Initiatory turns .21* .24** .21* .16y .21* .14 .27** .27** .18*
Failed turns .09 .03 .09 .11 .14 .10 .10 .13 .04
Conflictual turns .02 .10 .02 .09 .04 .09 .12 .04 .12
Children’s Mental-state references .26** .31** .26** .25** .22** .25** .31** .19* .31**
Connected turns .16y .18* .16y .21* .23** .20* .26** .22** .21*
Initiatory turns .08 .05 .08 .07 .08 .07 .05 .05 .12
Failed turns .12 .06 .12 .01 .00 .01 .04 .06 .02
Conflictual turns .06 .12 .06 .05 .07 .05 .03 .01 .05

Note. Emotion 5 emotion understanding; False belief 5 false belief understanding; Social 5 social understanding.
y
p , .10. *p , .05. **p , .01.
210 Ensor and Hughes

of age, r(120)  .25, p , .01, even when effects of verbal ers’ cognitive references and connected turns as
comprehension were partialed, r(120)  .18, p , .05. predictors of children’s age 4 social understanding.
Correlations: Connected, initiatory, failed, and Here, we entered children’s mental-state references,
conflictual turns. Mothers’ connected turns were signifi- mothers’ cognitive references, and mothers’ con-
cantly correlated with social understanding at 2, 3, and nected turns at Step 2 of the regression equation.
4 years of age, r(120)  .28, p , .01, even when children’s Children’s mental-state references and mothers’ con-
concurrent verbal comprehension scores were partialed, nected utterances (but not mothers’ cognitive refer-
r(120)  .26, p , .01. Children’s connected turns were ences) were significant predictors and together
marginally correlated with age 2 social understanding, accounted for an additional 5% of the variance in
r(120) 5 .16, p , .10, and significantly correlated with children’s age 4 social understanding, DR2 5 .05,
social understanding at 3 and 4 years of age, r(120)  .25, Finc(3, 112) 5 3.55, p , .02. The largest variance
p , .05; however, these latter correlations fell below inflation factor (VIF) was 6.23, indicating no problems
significance, when we partialled effects of verbal com- of multicollinearity (Bowerman & O’Connell, 1990),
prehension, r(120)  .11, ns. and the maximum Cook’s distance was .14, indicating
Mothers’ initiations were marginally correlated that no outliers were identified (Cook & Weisberg,
with social understanding at 3 years of age, r(120) 5 1982).
.16, p , .10, and significantly correlated with social We conducted the second analysis to assess the
understanding at 2 and 4 years of age, r(125)  .21, independence of mothers’ connected turns and cog-
p , .05; however, when we partialed effects of verbal nitive references as predictors of children’s age 4
comprehension, these correlations fell below signifi- social understanding. To minimize overlap between
cance, r(120)  .11, ns. Mothers’ failed and conflict constructs, we identified mothers’ cognitive referen-
turns were unrelated to social understanding at any ces that occurred outside connected utterances and
age, r(120)
.02, ns. Children’s initiatory, failed, and mothers’ connected turns that did not contain refer-
conflictual turns were not significantly correlated ences to cognitions. We entered children’s mental-
with social understanding at any age, r(120)
.12, ns. state references, mothers’ cognitive references that
Regression analyses: Mental-state references versus did not occur within connected turns, and mothers’
connected turns. As reported earlier, mothers’ refer- connected turns that did not contain references to
ences to cognitions and desires were particularly cognitions at Step 2 of the regression equation. Child-
likely to occur within connected turns. The correla- ren’s mental-state references and mothers’ connected
tions reported above demonstrate that mothers’ cog- turns that did not contain cognitive references (but
nitive references and connected turns (and child not mothers’ cognitive references that did not occur
mental-state references) were each associated with within connected turns) were independent predictors
higher social understanding in children. Together,
these findings indicate that mothers’ cognitive ref-
Table 5
erences and connected turns are likely to show Children’s (but Not Mothers’) Mental-State References and Mothers’
overlapping associations with children’s social Connected Turns Significantly Predict Children’s Age 4 Social Under-
understanding. To address this possibility, we con- standing
ducted two hierarchical regression analyses, in order
to assess whether mothers’ cognitive references and Variable B SE B b
connected turns are each significant and independent
Step 1 Maternal education .11 .05 .15*
predictors of children’s age 4 social understanding. In
No. of mother turns .00 .00 .23
both analyses, we entered the number of mother and No. of child turns .00 .00 .12
child turns, children’s age 2 social understanding and Age 2 social understanding .04 .01 .22**
age 4 verbal comprehension, and maternal education Age 4 verbal comprehension .03 .01 .47**
at Step 1 of the regression equation, R2 5 .44, F(5, 115) Step 2 Maternal education .11 .05 .14*
5 18.35, p , .001. The number of mother and child No. of mother turns .00 .00 .26
turns were included, as mentioned before, to ensure No. of child turns .00 .00 .21
comparability with prior studies that have used pro- Age 2 social understanding .03 .01 .19*
portional measures of talk. The other background Age 4 verbal comprehension .03 .01 .46**
measures were included because, as reported earlier, Child mental-state references .04 .01 .24*
Mother cognitive references .01 .02 .06
each was significantly correlated with age 4 social
Mother connected turns .03 .01 .26*
understanding.
Table 5 summarizes the results of a regression Note. R2 5 .44** for Step 1; DR2 5 .05* for Step 2.
analysis conducted to assess the significance of moth- *p , .05. **p , .01.
 Mother – Child Talk and Early Social Understanding 211

and accounted for an additional 5% of the variance in
children’s age 4 social understanding, DR2 5 .05,
Finc(3, 112) 5 3.59, p , .02.
Does Connected Talk Moderate Associations Between
Mental-State References and Social Understanding?
Our third hypothesis was that children’s social
understanding would be particularly strongly asso-
ciated with mental-state references that occur within
connected (as opposed to failed or conflictual) turns.
Table 6 shows the correlations between children’s
social understanding and both mothers’ and child-
ren’s mental-state references within each type of
speaker turn (i.e., connected, initiatory, failed, or
conflictual).
Correlations, by type of turn. Within connected turns,
mothers’ and children’s mental-state references were
significantly correlated with social understanding at
ages 2, 3, and 4, r(120)  .25, p , .01. Within initiations,
mothers’ mental-state references were correlated with
social understanding, marginally significantly at 3
years of age, r(120) 5 .17, p , .10, and significantly at 2
and 4 years of age, r(120)  .24, p , .05. Children’s
mental-state references within initiations were signifi-
cantly correlated with social understanding at 3 and 4
years of age, r(120)  .24, p , .05, but not at 2 years of
age, r(120)  .14, ns. (All of the preceding results
remained unchanged when we partialed effects of
children’s concurrent verbal comprehension, r(120) 
.18, p , .05.) Within failed or conflictual turns, however,
both mothers’ and children’s mental-state references
were not significantly correlated with social under-
standing at any age, r(125)
.14, ns.
Note that children’s social understanding showed
significantly stronger correlations with mothers’
mental-state references within connected turns than
within either failed or conflictual turns, z(120) . 2.89,
p , .05; the one exception here was a marginally
significant contrast in the strength of correlations
between mothers’ connected versus conflictual men-
tal-state references and age 2 social understanding,
z(120) . 1.85, p ,. 10. Children’s social understanding
at all three time points was also significantly more
strongly correlated with the frequencies of their
mental-state references within connected turns than
within failed turns, z(120) . 2.41, p , .05; in addition,
age 4 social understanding was significantly more
strongly correlated with children’s mental-state refer-
ences within connected versus conflictual turns,
z(120) 5 2.05, p , .05.
Regression analysis. Table 7 summarizes the find-
ings from a regression analysis that examined whether
mothers’ and children’s references to mental states
within connected turns explained unique variance in
children’s age 4 social understanding. As before, at
Step 1 of the regression equation, we entered the
number of mother and child utterances, children’s
age 2 social understanding and age 4 verbal compre-
hension, and maternal education, R2 5 .44, F(5, 115) 5
18.35, p , .001. At Step 2 of the equation, mothers’ and
children’s connected mental-state references were each
independent predictors and together accounted for an
additional 6% of variance in children’s age 4 social
understanding, DR2 5 .06, Finc (3, 112) 5 3.55, p , .02.
The largest VIF was 4.96, indicating no problems of
multicollinearity, and the maximum Cook’s distance
was .12, indicating that no outliers were identified.
Summary
Three main findings emerged from the present
study. First, the majority of mothers referred to
cognitions and desires preferentially within

Table 6
Correlations Between Mental-State References Within Connected, Initiatory, Failed, and Conflictual Turns and Children’s Social Understanding

Age 2 Age 3 Age 4

Quality
Speaker Content of turn of turn Social False belief Emotion Social False belief Emotion Social False belief Emotion

Mother Mental-state Connected .32** .31** .32** .42** .29** .41** .48** .34** .44**
references Initiation .24** .24** .24** .17y .16y .16y .24** .24** .16y
Failed .15 .15 .15 .05 .05 .05 .05 .05 .00
Conflict .09 .09 .09 .07 .07 .07 .10 .10 .08
Children Mental-state Connected .25** .29** .25** .31** .21* .31** .37** .26** .32**
references Initiation .14 .13 .14 .26** .16y .26** .24** .14 .25**
Failed .13 .06 .14 .13 .13 .12 .12 .12 .09
Conflict .06 .05 .05 .04 .13 .05 .10 .13 .07

Note. Emotion 5 emotion understanding; False belief 5 false belief understanding; Social 5 social understanding.
y
p , .10. *p , .05. **p , .01.
212 Ensor and Hughes

Table 7 present study. Our findings also demonstrate that

Mothers’ and Children’s Mental-State References Within Connected connectedness was both a strong predictor of child-
Turns Significantly Predict Children’s Age 4 Social Understanding ren’s social understanding and an important moder-
Variable B SE B b
ator: Children’s concepts of mind and emotion appear
to be most clearly reflected and/or promoted by
Step 1 Maternal education .11 .05 .15* mental-state references that occur within connected
No. of mother turns .00 .00 .23 conversations.
No. of child turns .00 .00 .12 Before discussing these findings, we should note
Age 2 social understanding .04 .01 .22** that others have, from a cognitive perspective, also
Age 4 verbal comprehension .03 .01 .47** argued that the mental-state terms and concepts
Step 2 Maternal education .11 .05 .15*
children encounter in conversations may not be
No. of mother turns .00 .00 .23
sufficient to promote their social understanding. For
No. of child turns .00 .00 .12
Age 2 social understanding .03 .01 .18*
example, de Villiers (2000) argues that specific syn-
Age 4 verbal comprehension .03 .01 .39** tactic structures (embedded complements) must be
Child connected .40 .17 .21* mastered before children can attribute different
mental-state references points of view. In brief, mental verbs typically occur
Mother connected .40 .19 .22* as main verbs in complex sentences with subordinate
mental-state references clauses—the sentential complement—as their gram-
matical object. Children use such embedded comple-
Note. R2 5 .44** for Step 1; DR2 5 .06* for Step 2.
*p , .05. **p , .01.
ments almost as soon as they start to produce mental
verbs, that is, around 2 years of age (Bartsch &
Wellman, 1995; Bretherton & Beeghly, 1982). Thus,
connected turns. Second, children’s mental-state by taking the frequency of children’s mental-state
references and mothers’ connected turns were each references into account, in the present study, we have,
significant and independent predictors of children’s by proxy, also controlled for children’s use of embed-
age 4 social understanding, even when the quantity of ded complements. However, a second wave of con-
maternal and child talk and children’s age 4 verbal versation excerpts is needed to examine child-driven
comprehension and age 2 social understanding were effects more completely. Children with precocious
all taken into account. Third, a moderation effect was social understanding may be especially skilled in
found such that predictive associations with child- eliciting connected talk; indeed, it is known that
ren’s age 4 social understanding were strongest for young children play a crucial role in initiating con-
mothers’ and children’s mental-state references versations (Clarke-Stewart & Hevey, 1981). Despite
within connected turns. this limitation, the present findings are valuable in
highlighting the potential importance of connected-
ness and in delineating the types of mental-state talk
that are particularly closely related to children’s social
Discussion
understanding.
The present study takes as its starting point the Children’s social understanding was more
premise that the act of engaging another person in strongly related to mothers’ references to cognitions
conversation implies an expectation to exchange or than to desires or emotions, even though both moth-
share points of view (de Rosnay & Hughes, 2006). ers and children referred to desires more frequently
Children’s experiences of such connectedness have than cognitions. Such lack of associations between
received surprisingly little research attention, even mothers’ desire and emotion references and child-
though it is known that children who are successful ren’s social understanding may reflect the consider-
on false belief tasks engage in frequent connected able variability within these categories of mental-state
conversations (Dunn & Brophy, 2005; Dunn & talk. For example, routine enquires (e.g., ‘‘Do you
Cutting, 1999; Slomkowski & Dunn, 1996). The pres- want this crayon?’’) are less likely to promote reflec-
ent findings demonstrate elevated frequencies of tion on mental states than are references to desires
references to cognitions, desires, and emotions within that occur within explanations of others’ actions (e.g.,
connected conversation compared with other forms ‘‘He chose that color because he wanted to finish his
of speech. This raises the likelihood that any associ- picture.’’). Nonetheless, our findings corroborate the
ation between mental-state talk and social under- findings of Jenkins et al. (2003) that exposure to family
standing may be explained by this overlap with talk about cognitions, rather than desires, was asso-
connectedness; this possibility was confirmed in the ciated with increases in children’s cognitive talk from

2 to 4 years of age. That said, we also found that
mothers’ cognitive references did not explain unique
variance in children’s social understanding once
effects of child verbal comprehension, age 2 social
understanding, the quantity of mother and child talk,
children’s mental-state references, and, importantly,
mothers’ connected turns were controlled. In contrast,
mothers’ connectedness was not only a significant
correlate but also an independent predictor of child-
ren’s social understanding at the age of 4 years. This
finding may carry implications for those of previous
studies, as apparently strong associations between
mental-state talk and children’s social understanding
may reflect covarying effects of connectedness.
Why might mothers’ connectedness matter? Just as
a child’s acquisition of language is accelerated by
adults’ sensitivity in labeling objects within the
child’s focus of attention (Tomasello & Barton, 1994;
Tomasello & Farrar, 1986; Tomasello & Todd, 1983), so
too, a child’s social understanding appears to be
enhanced by adults’ comments that are related to
a child’s utterances. Such a shared conversational
focus makes salient the similarities or differences
between the child’s and interlocutor’s points of view.
In addition, connectedness enables conversational
partners to coconstruct a shared perspective. Alter-
natively, connected interactions may be characterized
by reduced negativity, which in turn is likely to be
beneficial for children’s understanding of mind and
emotion (Ruffman, Perner, & Parkin, 1999). Support
for the latter proposal comes from recent findings
demonstrating that mothers who tended to attribute
mental states to their 4- to 5-year-old children dis-
played reduced hostility and intrusiveness when
interacting with their children (Lok & McMahon,
2006). However, connected conflictual utterances
were included in our indices of connectedness. This
suggests that, for the 2-year-olds in our sample at
least, connectedness is not simply a proxy for the
affective tone of an interaction.
It would be premature, however, to conclude that
explicit labeling of mental states does not matter for
children’s social understanding. When we examined
the interplay between mental-state and connected
talk, we found that children’s and mothers’ mental-
states’ references within connected (but not within
failed or conflictual) turns did predict children’s
social understanding at the age of 4 years. One
account of this finding is that mental states can only
be fully explained within connected conversations. In
line with this proposal, researchers have emphasized
that explanations within family talk help children
understand emotions (Denham, Zoller, & Couchod,
1994). Likewise, references to past mental states
Mother – Child Talk and Early Social Understanding 213
during reminiscing are typically embedded in an
explanatory narrative and so have been presented as
critical for children’s theory of mind (Fivush &
Nelson, 2006). In the present study, mothers did, in
some instances, explain their mental state during
connected conversations; in the following extract,
for example, a mother explains her thoughts about
the insect she inspects with her daughter.
Child 1, 2, 3, 4. (counting the insect’s legs)
Mother 5. I think he’s having a bad day.
Child Because he’s, because he’s?
Mother Because he’s missing a leg. He should have six.
Mental states are not, however, always explained
in connected conversations; for example, in the fol-
lowing extract, the references to mental states are not
explained but are used to highlight the discrepancy
between the mother’s and child’s beliefs.
Child What’s the noise?
Mother A neighbor talking?
Child A lion.
Mother I hope it’s not a lion.
Child It is a lion
Mother It is a lion? I thought we
only had lions in zoos in this country.
Why then might references to mental states be
especially meaningful when couched within con-
nected turns? Recall that connected turns are seman-
tically related to a child’s comment, and so, by
definition, mental-state references that occur within
a connected dialogue are relevant to the child’s
current focus of attention. Put another way, engage-
ment with, rather than exposure to, mental-state talk
appears to be valuable in promoting children’s social
understanding. This proposal converges with the
recent literature on maternal mind-mindedness that
highlights the particular importance of mothers’
‘‘appropriate’’ comments on their infants’ mental
states for their children’s later performance on false
belief tasks (Meins et al., 2002).
Talk about emotions may in particular comprise an
essential cornerstone in the development of young
children’s psychological understanding (Fivush &
Nelson, 2006; Lagattuta & Wellman, 2002, p. 557).
Early parent – child talk about past experiences, par-
ticularly those involving negative emotions, contains
much discussion of both the external and internal
214 Ensor and Hughes
causes of feelings (Brown & Dunn, 1991; Lagattuta &
Wellman, 2002). Such discussions, however, did not
occur with sufficient frequency to permit fine-grained
analysis in the present study. Instead, what mattered
for children’s social understanding in the current
study was the ‘‘meeting of minds’’ within conversa-
tion. That is, our findings indicated that connected-
ness is also a crucial context for the mental-state
references that promotes children’s social under-
standing. Excerpts from children’s conversations at
different ages are now needed to assess how child-
ren’s awareness of mental states contributes to family
conversations. Further research is also necessary to
examine the importance of children’s exposure to
conversations in which they are not directly involved.
By documenting the variety of children’s experiences
of connectedness, we hope that future research will
further improve our understanding of how these
conversations enable children to venture beyond the
here and now of human action to engage in a ‘‘meeting
of minds.’’
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