engleski

Joint attention and mental state talk about desire in young children in Croatia

The aim of this research was to investigate the relationship between the early theory of mind abilities, assessed through measures of initiating joint attention (IJA) and responding to joint attention (RJA) and mental state talk about desire in children aged 18 to 36 months. The research included 106 participants, aged 17 to 37 months, from Croatia. Initiating and responding to joint attention were assessed using the Early Social Communication Scales (Mundy et al., 2003). In order to collect the speech samples needed for mental state talk analysis, children were videotaped interacting with their parents for 15 minutes. All the videos were later transcribed. The analysis included searching for all of the children’s uses of the verbs “htjeti” (want) and “željeti” (wish) as well as their use of the first conditional. The next step included searching for all the utterances in which children used the above mentioned linguistic means to refer to desires as mental states. Results show a significant positive correlation between the quantity of mental state talk about desire and RJA, but not IJA. This is an important finding because it enables us to make the connection between RJA, which we consider to be the index of the early theory of mind development, and talk about mental state of desire in children aged 17 to 37 months. In other words, we can conclude that the children aged one and a half to three years who have better theory of mind development talk more about the mental state of desire.

joint attention, mental state talk about deisre

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