Mother–child conversation and social understanding in Pakistan

Abstract

Two studies are presented to examine whether and why 3–5-year-olds in Pakistan display limited social understanding. Study 1 tested 71 preschoolers on Lillard and Flavell’s (1992) test of desires, pretence and beliefs, plus two false belief tasks, and showed very limited understanding across these measures even though almost half were over 5 years old. Study 2 replicated this effect with 35 preschoolers, and also conducted home observations of mother–child interaction at two time points. It tested three competing explanations of the role of adult-conversation in the preschooler’s developing understanding of the mind: the quality of the caregiver’s references to mental states, the child’s grasp of mental state language in such conversations, and the connectedness of adult–child talk. These factors are usually highly correlated in Western cultures. In Pakistan, with a delay in the acquisition of social understanding skills, Study 2 showed that maternal and child references to mental states were rare (2% of maternal and 1% of child utterances). Analyses of the relationship between mother–child conversation and the children’s test performance suggested that the measures of social understanding were not predicted uniquely by the connectedness of talk within the dyad, or maternal use of mental state terms. However, the children’s concurrent (and to a lesser extent previous) use of mental state terms was related to their grasp of mental states. Thus, the data support previous analyses, which suggests that the child’s construction of mental state terms is more crucial in their grasp of the social world.

Keywords

belief desire false belief mental state talk mother–child conversation preschoolers pretence social understanding theory of mind

One of the major achievements of the preschool period is the emergence of an understanding that human actions may be driven by mental states. A shift at the age of 4 years, documented in Western children (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001), has been attributed to the child’s early language environment (e.g., San Juan & Astington, 2017) and the means by which attention to actors’ orientation to goals (e.g., Baillargeon, Scott, & Bain, 2016) influences more mature social understanding. The evidence also suggests delays in the grasp of false beliefs in some countries (Japan, Austria) of up to 2 years behind Western norms (Wellman et al., 2001). We examine a non-Western culture recently suggested to show a lag in mental state understanding, to explore which factors may facilitate or delay the emergence of social understanding (Nawaz, Hanif, & Lewis, 2015). We examine if there is a developmental lag in social understanding in Pakistan (Studies 1 & 2) and whether concurrent and prior maternal and child language use in interaction relates to the child’s grasp of mental states (Study 2).

Verbal interaction facilitates children’s social understanding in analyses of elicited talk (Howard, Mayeux, & Naigles, 2008; Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2008) and longitudinal investigations (Ruffman, Slade, & Crowe, 2002). Pavarini, de Hollanda Souza, and Hawk’s (2013) analyses of 78 studies suggest that a range of parental practices may induce mental state understanding in their children, including an exposure to a range of emotions, treating the child as an intentional agent and parental talk about mental states. Three possible mechanisms have been proposed to account for the role of language in social understanding.

The first proposed mechanism holds that how caregivers structure conversational interaction influences children’s grasp of mental state language, allowing them to join their “community of minds” (Nelson, 2005). Western children who experience mental state talk at home produce better performance in false belief 7 months later (Dunn, Brown, Slomkowski, Tesla, & Youngblade, 1991). Recent studies show that maternal psychological talk relates to children’s cognitive term usage (Symons, Fossum, & Collins, 2006) and their grasp of discrepant desires and visual perspective taking (Laranjo, Bernier, Meins, & Carlson, 2010). Thus, maternal psychological talk may facilitate children’s later social understanding (Adrián, Clemente, & Villanueva, 2007). Even simply overhearing people referring to others’ mental states improves children’s false belief understanding (Gola, 2012). When children receive restricted input, for example from mothers with borderline personality disorder (who use fewer mental state attributes to describe their children), they develop poorer mental state understanding (Schacht, Hammond, Marks, Wood, & Conroy, 2013). Deaf children raised by hearing parents show deficient mental state understanding, but those with deaf parents do not (e.g., Woolfe, Want, & Siegal, 2002). Yet, deaf children with cochlear implants or hearing amplification, but with hearing mothers, show a grasp of mental states consistent with those of hearing children (Morgan et al., 2014) and maternal mental state conversation relates to greater understanding in deaf children (Moeller & Schick, 2006).

Teaching about individual aspects of the mind may be very specific. For example, maternal discussion of emotions may influence the child’s own emotion references (Denham, Cook, & Zoller, 1992). Similarly, mothers’ cognitive talk at 24 months predicts children’s mental state language at the 33 months (Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2008) and their use of cognitive terms during picture book reading at age 3 years relates to children’s grasp of mental states at age 5 (Adrián et al., 2007). Yet, parental explanations using mental state terms may have a more general effect. Mothers’ desire references with 15-month-olds have predicted emotion understanding and mental state language tested 9 months later (Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2006), while talk of mental states relates to concurrent (de Rosnay, Pons, Harris, & Morrell, 2004) and future (Meins & Fernyhough, 1999) emotion attribution.

Maternal language may influence the child’s later mental state understanding but not the reverse. Earlier maternal mental state references correlate with later child test performance while the child’s own mental state understanding does not (Ruffman et al., 2002). A grasp of the mind has been predicted by mental state talk that is clarifying (Slaughter, Peterson, & Mackintosh, 2007), explanatory (Tenenbaum, Alfieri, Brooks, & Dunne, 2008), or causal explanatory in nature (LaBounty, Wellman, Olson, Lagattuta, & Liu, 2008).

Such effects may not only be in one direction. Children’s own comprehension of emotion terms (choosing an emotion specific to the situation and explaining their choice) may facilitate their subsequent emotion understanding (Ornaghi, Brockmeier, & Grazzani, 2014). Thus, a second proposition is that an ability to explain one’s actions drives the child’s understanding of the mind (especially contrastive mental state terms). This view fits theoretical accounts which assume that children grasp desires first, then beliefs and contrasting beliefs, reflecting the language input they receive (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995). Carpendale and Lewis (2004; section 3.2) argue that a grasp of individual mental state terms develops in a piecemeal fashion and drives social understanding. Supportive evidence comes from one examination of the role of language, where reference to the agent’s actions (“Where will he look for X?”) are competed over by synonymous mental state terms, with poor social understanding in 5-year-olds when the term meaning “search” is used, but advanced understanding in 3-year-olds if the word meaning “look” is employed (Maridaki-Kassotaki, Lewis, & Freeman, 2003). The view that children’s constructions are important is also supported by the finding that preschoolers who produce more mental state talk with their friends are more likely to show concurrent and subsequent false belief understanding (Hughes & Dunn, 1998). Similar effects have been shown in a naturalistic interaction (Brown, Donelan-McCall, & Dunn, 1996).

A third possible mechanism holds that the connectedness of parent–child conversation provides an ideal framework, not simply the contributions of each participant. Judy Dunn discovered that when mothers who used causal talk a congenial context (joking, play) had preschoolers who performed better on later cognitive assessment (Dunn & Brophy, 2005). Other studies show that appropriate maternal mental state references (Laranjo et al., 2010), the amount of synchronized talk (Ensor & Hughes, 2008), and the child’s own connected language (Slomkowski & Dunn, 1996) are each associated with measures of the child’s grasp of mental states. Collaboratively attending to an event is at the heart of these relationships. Appropriate adaption of maternal instructions during collaborative problem solving mediates the relationship between a mother’s mental attributions of the child (mind mindedness) and that preschooler’s social understanding (Lundy, 2013).

In an attempt to identify the nature of this connected conversation, research has found that this may include the quality of mother and child reminiscences (Laible, Panfile Murphy, & Augustine, 2013), particularly about the child’s past negative emotions and maternal elaboration on these (Laible, 2011). A lack of engagement within a dyad also correlates with un-attuned maternal mental state talk and an inaccurate interpretation of child’s contribution to such conversation (Meins et al., 2012). The connectedness in mother–child discussion, particularly mothers’ ability to reflect accurately on children’s mental states, links with the latter’s social understanding (Meins et al., 2012), suggesting a facilitative role (Meins, Fernyhough, Arnott, Leekam, & de Rosnay, 2013).

The studies reviewed above focus on the synchrony of parent–child interaction in Western cultures, usually in highly privileged families (e.g, Laible et al., 2013). It is also highly likely that parental input, the child’s grasp of mental state terms, and the connectedness of mother–child conversation are highly correlated in these studies. To our knowledge, only one study of parent–child conversation has focused on a culture in which children with delayed grasp of mental states; that is, Japan (Toyama, 2012). This finds concurrent links between maternal references to mental states and their children’s false-belief performance. However, we have found no longitudinal data in such a culture. Research comparing children’s grasp of mental states in different cultural groups has yielded contrasting findings. A multi-site study showed approximately similar performance across five nations including Canada and India (Callaghan et al., 2005). One investigation in West Africa reported some success in 3-year-olds on mental state understanding tasks adapted to the culture (Avis & Harris, 1991). Yet, other evidence from South America (Beckmann De Castro Menezes, Da Silva Cruz, Veloso Corrêa, & Brito, 2014; Vinden, 1996), India (Wahi & Johri, 1994) and on Indian immigrant children in Canada (Markel, Major, & Pelletier, 2012) found a delay in understanding the mind. In some cultures, poor social understanding even beyond age 7 is reported (Mayer & Träuble, 2013; Vinden, 1996, 1999). Delays are found in low socioeconomic-class Western children (e.g., Holmes, Black, & Miller, 1996; Pears & Moses, 2003), but these are relatively small in comparison.

In Asia, several cultures show a 2-year lag in the skills required to pass the seminal test of social understanding, false belief. This was first reported in a series of studies in Japan (e.g., Naito & Koyama, 2006) but is also shown in China (e.g., Lewis, Huang, & Rooksby, 2006) and confirmed in a meta-analysis (Liu, Wellman, Tardif, & Sabbagh, 2008). The location of this investigation is Pakistan. While one investigation in India suggests a comparable developmental trajectory (Callaghan et al., 2005) to the West, the one published study in its neighbour, Pakistan, shows a pattern more in keeping with East Asia (Nawaz et al., 2015) and one study of Indian children’s ability to grasp mental states (Wahi & Johri, 1994). Thus, the first aim of this article is to confirm whether children in Pakistan will show a lag in their social understanding (Studies 1 and 2), over a range of mental states. To date the data are on 3- and 4-year-olds in one study and we need both to replicate this finding (Open Science Collaboration, 2015) and to extend the age range. The second aim is to examine whether this understanding is predicted by the nature of conversation in mother–child pairs within typical social interaction at home (Study 2).

Study 1

To investigate whether there is a lag in social understanding in Pakistan, preschoolers were tested on a range of social understanding tasks (pretence, desire, false belief). Children’s grasp of desire and pretence emerges before their understanding of belief (Wellman, 1990), and we examine whether any problems found by Nawaz, Hanif, and Lewis (2015) could be found across a range of areas of mental state understanding. They showed that 3-year-old children in Pakistan were below chance on standard tests of false belief (Experiment 1), while 4-year-olds were largely at chance. Their investigation included 12 children aged 5 years (N = 12), but this was not enough for individual scrutiny of this age group. A larger proportion of this sample (45% of the sample) was aged 5 so that we could discern whether any developmental trends are evident in the sixth year of life in Pakistan.

Method

Participants

Seventy-one 3–5-year-olds (M = 4.3; SD = .76; range = 3.01–5.11) were recruited from Mansehra, a city in the northwest of Pakistan with 1.7 million inhabitants. Socio-economic status (SES), based on occupation and education of the main breadwinner, showed that 78% were from middle class, and 22% from lower middle class. However, in keeping with the population of the country, most families were from low income groups; 60% of the population and most of these two-parent families live on a family income below $2 a day (World Development Indicator, The World Bank, 2013). Thirty-two were aged 5–5:11. Following parental consent, each child was tested at home.

Materials and design

Lillard and Flavell’s (1992) Pretence, Desire and Belief Tasks: These involved a collection of blue, red and pink boxes (12 × 7 × 16 cm). In each trial a different object (key, spoon, biscuit, toffee, car, ball) was placed inside a box, held by one of three dolls (Ayesha/Ali/Ahmed). The protagonist enacted a scene involving a pretence, desire, or belief about the content of a box. Once children correctly repeated the protagonist’s mental state (labelled immediately before by the experimenter), they were given access to the real content (which was always different from the protagonist’s mental state about the box) and the lid left open. The participant was requested to report the box’s true content (i.e., what they could see), the lid closed and then he or she was asked what the protagonist pretended/wanted/thought was in the box.

For example, in the pretence condition, the child was told “Ali is pretending there’s a key in the box”. The experimenter pointed to the (e.g.) red box and asked the initial control question, “What’s Ali pretending is in the box?” Following the answer “key”, the child was asked to open the box to find that there was a spoon in there. The participant was then asked question, “What’s in there really?” (reality control) followed by “What is Ali pretending is in the box?” (mental state test question). The box, characters and the items (real and pretended) were counterbalanced across children and across mental states (pretence/desire/think).

False belief tasks: Two were administered: the Deceptive Box task (Perner, Leekam, & Wimmer, 1987) and the Unexpected Transfer test (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). These were adapted to the cultural context, simply by changing the protagonist’s name (Ayesha, Ahmed, Ali) and the items to a those that are common in Pakistan (toy animals: dog, cat rather than cartoon figures in original task), but otherwise were identical to the original procedures. In each, children were asked, respectively, to report their own previous false belief and a naïve child’s report about a familiar box with an unusual content or to predict the search action of a protagonist who is unaware of the current change location of an object. The usual control probe(s) followed these test questions.

Procedure

After rapport building with the child, the mental state tasks (pretence, desire, and belief), using a 3 × 3 Latin square, and two false belief tasks were presented in counterbalanced order.

Results

The false belief tests were scored in usual way with a pass only awarded if the child answered a test question and its accompanying control question[s] correctly. Performance against chance (binomial test) was calculated (Table 1) for each test question for the whole sample and also just for the 5-year-olds (in brackets). In the Lillard and Flavell tasks performance on pretence, desire and belief was at chance, even at age 5. Replicating Nawaz et al.’s (2015) findings in both false belief tasks, children performed below chance on all three test questions, and the 5-year-olds were at chance (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Numbers and proportions of children in Study 1 who pass and fail the pretend, desire, belief and two false belief tasks (performance of 5-year-olds in parenthesis).

	Category	N	Observed proportion	p	95% CI (Wilson method) for whole sample
What is Fatima pretending is in the box? (Pretence)	Pass	32(15)	.45(.47)	.48(.86)	.34–.57
What is Fatima pretending is in the box? (Pretence)	Fail	39(17)	.55(.53)
What does Ali want there to be in the box? (Desire)	Pass	29(18)	.41(.56)	.15(.6)	.3–.52
What does Ali want there to be in the box? (Desire)	Fail	42(14)	.59(.44)
What does Ahmed think is in the box? (Belief)	Pass	32(17)	.45(.53)	.48(.86)	.34–.57
What does Ahmed think is in the box? (Belief)	Fail	39(15)	.55(.47)
Deceptive box other: What will [another child at the nursery] think is in the box?	Pass	19(12)	.27(.38)	<.001(.21)	.18–.38
	Fail	52(20)	.73(.63)
Deceptive box self: What did you think was in the box at the beginning?	Pass	18(11)	.25(.34)	<.001(.11)	.17–.37
	Fail	53(21)	.75(.66)
Where will horse look for his grass first?	Pass	25(11)	.35(.34)	.02(.11)	.25–.47
Where will horse look for his grass first?	Fail	46(21)	.65(.66)

Note. 3-year-olds n = 14; 4-year-olds n = 25; 5-year-olds n = 32.

Secondly, to test any developments between ages 3 and 5, a series of logistic regressions was conducted for each task, examining performance of each individual test question regressed onto age in months. Table 2 shows that the models for two Lillard and Flavell tasks (desire p = .001; belief p = .02) were significant, with the third showing a trend (pretence p = .05) but the odds ratios of near 1 show only very slight change between 3 and 5 years. There was no change across age in either of the false belief tests.

Table 2.

Logistic regression analysis of predictors of pretend, desire, belief, false belief tasks, by age (in months as the single explanatory variable).

Dependent variable	B	SE	χ²	R²	Wald	Odds Ratio	p	95% C.I.
Pretence	.05	.02	4.11	.07	3.76	1.05	.052	.99–1.12
Desire	.12	.03	13.79	.24	10.19	1.12	.001	1.04–1.21
Belief	.07	.03	6.43	.12	5.56	1.07	.018	1.01–1.14
Deceptive box (other)	.05	.03	3.18	.06	2.90	1.05	.088	.99–1.12
Deceptive box (self)	.03	.03	1.62	.03	1.54	1.04	.214	.97–1.10
Standard location task	.03	.02	1.64	.03	1.57	1.03	.209	.98–1.09

Note. 3-year-olds n = 14; 4-year-olds n = 25; 5-year-olds n = 32.

Discussion

The results extend previous findings showing that children in Pakistan do not show a developmental transition from an understanding of desire around age 3 to a grasp of mistaken beliefs at around age 4. The findings against chance contrast with Western data showing that 2-year-olds gain some understanding of desires and pretence (Wellman, 1990). In Lillard and Flavell’s (1992) original analysis 3-year-olds were significantly above chance in both experiments on all three measures – concerning a protagonist’s desire, pretence and thinking. In this study, the 5-year-olds failed to understand these simpler mental states, confirming the lag in performance suggested by Nawaz et al. (2015) for Pakistan. This poor performance in both studies might be that a larger proportion of children in Pakistan develop in households at or below the poverty line. Wahi and Johri’s (1994) analysis of Indian preschoolers’ grasp of mental states compared children from an affluent community with those in more constrained social circumstances. It showed much poorer performance in the latter group, which we suspect would be more like the population in Pakistan (Baidee, 2013). While consistent with children in other Asian countries, such as Hong Kong (Liu et al., 2008), these patterns of performance raise questions about whether factors in the child’s home language environment predict the child’s developing social understanding.

Study 2

We surmised that studying mother–child conversation in a culture with delayed social understanding might throw light upon the reasons for this lag. In order to obtain a reliable sample of conversation, mother–child pairs were video-filmed twice at their homes undergoing everyday activities. We selected a wide age range in the sample both to be consistent with Study 1 and given that at around age 5 we witnessed some movement towards the acquisition of these key skills.

Some Western studies (Adrián et al., 2007; Ruffman et al., 2002; Slaughter et al., 2007) employed conversation eliciting techniques (free play, describe your child, describe the pictures, or non-word story books). These may be unnatural to families in Pakistan so, following Jenkins, Turrell, Kogushi, Lollis, and Ross (2003), we used naturalistic observations in the child’s home to sample sufficient mother–child conversation. We hypothesized that the quality of mental state talk within mother–child dyads would predict the child’s concurrent and later social understanding, assessed by the same measures in Study 1. Following Ensor and Hughes’ (2008) study of a socially diverse Western population, we examined three possible influences on the child’s grasp of mental states—mothers’ mentalistic references, children’s use of mental state terms and the connectedness of the conversation between them. By examining the nature of mother–child communication we hoped to deliberate between these three theoretical links.

Method

Participants

In a within-participants design, 35 mother–child (15 boys: 42.9%) dyads were recruited from Islamabad, and full parental consent was obtained. This new city draws its population from across Pakistan. While it is more linguistically diverse, the financial circumstances of the sample were comparable to those of Study 1. The MRSI (2011: “Sec Grid”) system was used to determine the socioeconomic class of the family and while 78% were “middle-class”, they were largely at or just above the poverty line. Two video recordings were conducted in the home, 8 months apart. The age ranges were 35–63 months (M = 48.37, SD = 8.08) at time 1 and 43–71 months (M = 56.37, SD = 8.08) at time 2. The inclusion criterion was that the child’s primary language was Urdu (the number of regional dialects may have created a problem in transcription and coding).

Coding and instruments

The observations took place at a time that was most convenient for the mother and the child, mostly in the afternoon. Houses in Pakistan are much smaller than those in the West and contain larger families and much more movement of people in and out of the living space. Given the daily heat, much of the interaction reported in this study took place in back yards or even roof tops where children tend to play and are cared for by an adult or older sibling. Despite a flow of family, kin and neighbours through the living space, it was possible to concentrate on the mother–child dyad. We did not code others’ contributions to the household interactions.

Each observation lasted at least 60 mins (the first 60 mins were used for analysis). The mother was instructed to go about her everyday routine, involving the child if this was typical. The children were engaged in their usual activities (typically playing, eating, doing homework). Occasional conflict with the mother or a passing neighbourhood child also occasionally erupted during recordings, suggesting the ease of the family with recordings. The observer followed the mother and child dyad around the home and yard, keeping disturbance to a minimum. Periods of non-interaction between the pairs were typical, while a minority of dyads were interactive throughout the hour.

The video recordings were transcribed verbatim and coded for quality and content of the mother–child talk. A conversational turn was defined as an utterance by one interlocutor bounded by the talk of another interlocutor or a silence of 4 s or more. Each utterance was coded for mental state references, coded into three categories (following Ensor & Hughes, 2008): the cognitive terms know, recall, memorise, learn, think, recite, forget, idea, concentrate, need, understand, and guess were found in the transcripts. The desire terms included would like, and want. The emotion terms included miss, happiness, afraid, enjoy, worry, like, dislike, surprise, favourite, boring, sad, angry, and irritate.

Each utterance was coded for one of four categories of quality of talk, adapted from Ensor and Hughes (2008). Connected talk concerned an utterance relevant to the previous utterance of the other interlocutor. An utterance followed by a nonverbal gesture (e.g., a head shake) was classified as connected if it occurred during a conversation and initiative if it stimulated conversation. In initiative talk, the interlocutor started a new topic and was successful in eliciting a relevant response. Failed talk occurred when a turn was not replied to. In conflict talk, a turn comprised a criticism, threat or insult. Unlike Ensor and Hughes’ coding scheme, utterances that contained conflict as well as connected/initiative/failed talk were always coded as conflict, because of the high proportion of connected talk recorded.

A second rater was trained to use the scheme and coded for over 1500 utterances (10% of the data) for quality and 95% for content of the talk. Cohen’s kappa was satisfactory for both overall quality of talk (.97) and individual categories of talk quality (range: .8–.97). Cohen’s kappa for mental state talk was also high (.96).

The social understanding measures were the same tasks as in Experiment 1 (both Lillard and Flavell’s measures and the two false belief tests). At each time point, the child was tested immediately after the observation session, in the home.

Results

Table 3 displays the types of utterances of the mother and child at each time period. Language quantity (total talk turns) quality (connected, initiative, conflict and failed talk) and content (desire, belief and emotion terms) were indexed for the mother–child dyads. Like Ensor and Hughes’ (2008) British data, Table 3 shows variation in both maternal and child talk, from only one utterance every 6 (mother) or 12 (child) minutes at time 1, to the almost four utterances per minute across the hour. There were 15,399 utterances in the 70 hours of observation.

Table 3.

Descriptive statistics for mental state and quality of talk measures for mother–child dyads at Times1 & 2 (proportions are presented in parentheses).

	Time 1			Time 2
Measure	Mean per hour	SD	Range	Mean per hour	SD	Range
Mother: Total talk	151.48	112.69	21–536	109.25	77.95	17–288
Connected talk	102.45 (.60)	104.46 (.14)	8–475 (.32–.88)	65.34 (.57)	54.55 (.12)	12–219 (.32–.80)
Initiative talk	18.14 (.15)	6.66 (.08)	5–32 (.01–.37)	16.77 (.18)	9.43 (.07)	3–52 (.07–.46)
Conflict talk	20.94 (.15)	13.38 (.06)	4–60 (.04–.28)	16.68 (.14)	17.56 (.08)	2–76 (.03–.33)
Failed talk	9.94 (.08)	6.57 (.05)	1–29 (.00–.28)	10.45 (.09)	11.04 (.06)	0–47 (.00–.26)
Desire talk	.11 (.00)	.32 (.00)	0 –1 (.00–.01)	.14 (.00)	.42 (.00)	0–2 (.00–.02)
Cognitive talk	2.74 (.01)	3.72 (.02)	0–17 (.00–.09)	2.60 (.02)	3.09 (.02)	0–13 (.00–.12)
Emotion talk	1.60 (.01)	2.23 (.01)	0–10 (.00–.05)	1.00 (.00)	2.02 (.00)	0–9 (.00–.03)
Total mental state talk	4.34 (.02)	4.53 (.03)	0–18 (.00–.13)	3.60 (.02)	4.01 (.02)	0–14 (.00–.12)
Child: Total talk	110.57	115.38	10–534	68.65	55.62	13–208
Connected talk	92.17 (.77)	106.40 (.13)	5–471 (.33–.93)	53.65 (.75)	46.55 (.11)	7–184 (.44–.93)
Initiative talk	10.82 (.13)	6.49 (.08)	2–25 (.03–.40)	9.11 (.14)	6.68 (.07)	0–33 (.00–.35)
Conflict talk	5.02 (.04)	7.93 (.03)	0–44 (.00–.13)	4.00 (.05)	5.01 (.05)	0–26 (.00–.17)
Failed talk	2.54 (.04)	2.41 (.05)	0–8 (.00–.28)	1.88 (.03)	1.81 (.04)	0–8 (.00–.20)
Desire talk	.00 (.00)	.00 (.00)	0 (.00)	.05 (.00)	.33 (.00)	0–2 (.00–.02)
Cognitive talk	1.25 (.00)	4.33 (.01)	0–25 (.00–.05)	.80 (.01)	1.13 (.01)	0–4 (.00–.07)
Emotion talk	.22 (.00)	.64 (.00)	0–3 (.00–.05)	.31 (.00)	.63 (.01)	0–2 (.00–.04)
Total mental state talk	1.48 (.01)	4.39 (.01)	0–25 (.00–.06)	1.11 (.01)	1.34 (.02)	0–5 (.00–.07)
Child social understanding	–	–	–	2.58	2.57	0–7.50

Note. 3-year-olds n = 6; 4-year-olds n = 18; 5-year-olds n = 11.

Conversation covered a diversity of topics. Indeed, utterances setting up a new topic (Initiative talk) constituted the second highest category (Table 3). “Failed talk” (a failure to elicit a response) was the least frequent category, showing that engagement was frequent. Connected talk, when both interlocutors continue the same topic, constituted 63 and 66 percent of the total talk at times 1 (9,172 utterances) & 2 (6,227 utterances), respectively. There was prolonged discussion about cricket (the national sport), homework, safeguarding one’s own interest, cartoons, or fantasy. In keeping with the UK data (Ensor & Hughes, 2008) there were disagreements, but also showing subtle negotiation tactics on the part of the child. For example, one mother called out to her 4-year-old daughter, “Laiba come for ablution”. Her child refused by replying that “I have some homework to complete”. In response to a mother’s demand for some action, e.g., “Do it this way” (demonstrating braid making), another child replied that “I cannot do it, you are older than me”. Such connected talk seemed to demonstrate an awareness of the speaker’s and listener’s perspective on the conversation.

Connected talk was higher than the 43% of maternal and 60% of child utterances recorded by Ensor and Hughes (2008). Yet, mental state references were much lower. So rare were references to beliefs, desires and emotions that Table 3 includes the total scores for all mental state terms. The 2% of maternal and 1% of child utterances at each time point compares with 24% for the mothers and 10% for the children in Ensor and Hughes’ (2008) UK sample and 6% for the children in Bartsch and Wellman’s (1995) US data. Five dyads (14%) at time 1 and six (17%) at time 2 did not use any mental state references.

To ensure the normality of the data, outliers were replaced with values closer to the mean (Tabachnik & Fidell, 2006). Given the variations in the amount of talk, the measures were calculated as a proportion of the utterances used by each participant. Mental state references (e.g., cognitive terms) were coded as binary variables (used vs. did not use). The child test data were very similar to those in Experiment 1, with chance performance on all measures except below chance performance on unexpected transfer (see Table 4). A Social Understanding composite was constructed, summing the test questions at time 2 from the Lillard-Flavell and standard tasks and taking into account performance on the associated control questions, with scores of .5 for passing the control probe and .5 cut for failing a control probe in the Lillard and Flavell tasks (in false belief a pass was recorded only if the control questions were passed as well), producing a scale of 0–7.5. This scale showed acceptable reliability (Kuder-Richardson [KR20] = .82).

Table 4.

Numbers and proportions of children in Study 2 who pass and fail the pretence, desire, belief and two false belief tasks.

	Category	N	Observed proportion	p	95% CI (Wilson)
What is Fatima pretending is in the box? (Pretence)	Pass	14	.4	.31	.26–.56
What is Fatima pretending is in the box? (Pretence)	Fail	21	.6
What does Ali want there to be in the box? (Desire)	Pass	14	.4	.31	.26–.56
What does Ali want there to be in the box? (Desire)	Fail	21	.6
What does Ahmed think is in the box? (Belief)	Pass	15	.43	.5	.28–.59
What does Ahmed think is in the box? (Belief)	Fail	20	.57
Deceptive box other: What will [another child at the nursery] think is in the box?	Pass	14	.4	.31	.26–.56
	Fail	21	.6
Deceptive box self: What did you think was in the box at the beginning?	Pass	12	.34	.09	.21–.51
	Fail	23	.66
Where will horse look for his grass first?	Pass	8	.23	.002	.12–.39
Where will horse look for his grass first?	Fail	27	.77

Note. 3-year-olds n = 6; 4-year-olds n = 18; 5-year-olds n = 11.

Table 5 presents Pearson correlations between the observational and test data. Two conversation measures related to the child’s social understanding at time 2: the number of new topics (initiative talk) introduced by the mother at time 1, while a failure of the child to reply at time 2 was negatively related. Given the preponderance of connected talk, it is not surprising that this appeared unrelated to social understanding. Two measures of the talk referring to mental states, the child’s cognitive terms at times 1 and 2, were positively correlated with social understanding.

Table 5.

Pearson correlations between the content and quality of talk at Time 1 & 2 and children’s social understanding (SU) Performance at Time 2.

		Language measures	SU composite	95% CI
Talk at time 1	Children’s	Connected talk	−.26	−.55 – −.08
		Initiative talk	.26	.08–.55
		Conflict talk	−.09	−.25–.41
		Failed talk	.32	−.02–.59
		Cognitive terms	.33 ⁺	0–.6
		Emotion terms	.26	.08–.55
	Mother’s	Connected talk	−.17	−.35–.02
		Initiative talk	.40*	.08–.65
		Conflict talk	−.11	−.43–.23
		Failed talk	.03	−.31–.36
		Cognitive terms	−.24	−.53–.1
		Emotion terms	.03	−.31–.36
Talk at time 2	Children’s	Connected talk	.11	−.23–.43
		Initiative talk	−.19	−.49–.15
		Conflict talk	.13	−.21–.44
		Failed talk	−.27	−.55–.07
		Cognitive terms	.37*	.04–.63
		Emotion terms	.05	−.29–.38
	Mother’s	Connected talk	.22	−.12–.52
		Initiative talk	.01	−.32–.34
		Conflict talk	−.09	−.25–.41
		Failed talk	−.41*	−.65–.09
		Cognitive terms	−.07	−.39–.27

Note. 3-year-olds n = 6; 4-year-olds n = 18; 5-year-olds n = 11.

⁺ p = .05. *p < .05.

To explore how the four significant language measures were jointly related to the child’s mental state understanding, the child’s test scores were regressed on the four significant variables in Table 6. Age was significantly related to Social Understanding, r(35) = . 56, p < .001, so it was included. The overall model was significant, F(5, 29) = 5.48, p = .001. Table 6 shows that child’s use of cognitive mental state terms at time 2 accounted for unique variance in the child test data. When we removed the child’s cognitive talk at time 1, which contributed little the model, age significantly predicted the social understanding. As a final check, the above analyses were performed on the data where raw frequencies for mental state terms were used (as opposed to binomial variable in the above analyses). The same patterns of data were found.

Table 6.

Standard multiple regression analysis of language variables and SU.

Variables	B	SE B	β	95% CI
Child age	.11	.06	.35	−00–.23
Maternal Initiative talk at time 1	5.16	5.45	.15	−5.98–16.32
Maternal failed talk at time 2	−8.90	5.35	−.23	−19.85–2.03
Child cognitive talk at time 1	.30	.93	.05	−1.59–2.20
Child cognitive talk at time 2	1.50	.70	.29*	−.06–2.93

Note. 3-year-olds n = 6; 4-year-olds n = 18; 5-year-olds n = 11.

*p < .05.

General discussion

These studies raise three questions about the nature of social understanding. First, children’s performance on the test data need to be situated within the context of Western studies. Secondly, the mother–child communication in Study 2 produced different findings to the UK and US studies. We return, thirdly, to the three theoretical models on the link between mother–child communication and the child’s social understanding raised in the Introduction.

The children were up to 3 years behind Western preschoolers in the display of a grasp of more simple mental states, particularly desires. Lillard and Flavell (1992) found that 70% of US 3-year-olds succeeded in identifying the protagonist’s desire. Fewer (65%) were successful with pretence, but both were grasped more easily than beliefs (50% at age 3). Not only were these Pakistani 5-year-olds’ grasp of simple mental states at chance, they were below chance on more standard false belief. These results extend the findings from some other Asian studies, particularly those cultures who are at or below the poverty line. They suggest that a more concerted effort needs to be made to explain the lag in some settings, not just in a grasp of false belief. One candidate is the child’s language environment.

The conversations recorded in Study 2 are remarkable in that so little of their detailed, connected mother–preschooler communication referred explicitly to mental states. As the extracts showed the mother and child clearly understood the other’s perspective while maintaining their own position in the conversation. It has long been assumed that justifications using “because” (Russell, 1992) or references to an agent’s actions like “hide” and “look” (Turnbull & Carpendale, 1999) identify the mental world and serve as a trigger for developments in social understanding. Yet the co-occurrence of the low use of mental state terms in the everyday interaction and poor grasp of them in the test data suggest that talk about actions and reasons is not sufficient for a grasp of the mind.

Children’s test performance improved with age, allowing us to explore three aspects of mother–child conversation. One candidate, that connectedness in conversational interaction drives children’s mental state understanding (de Rosnay & Hughes, 2006), receives only partial support from Study 2 in that a failure of mothers to get a reply from child was negatively correlated with concurrent child’s social understanding at time 2 (see Table 5). However, this association was not significant in the multiple regressions, suggesting that this aspect of connectedness did not contribute unique variance to the child’s performance. The transcripts were full of connected talk, containing occasional references to mental states, but these again did not correlate with the child’s cognitive performance. This differs from the UK data that show a clear relationship (Ensor & Hughes, 2008) and suggest that such links may not be universal.

A second contender is that exposure to maternal mental state talk gives the child sufficient information to grasp how mental states work. This was not supported in Study 2. Mental state talk was scarce (2%), which is equivalent to the amount targeted at infants, but not younger children, in other cultures (Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2006). Maternal reference to desires, thoughts and emotions did not relate to current or future performance or Lillard and Flavell tasks or false belief tests. We found no evidence that maternal mental state terms explaining (Tenenbaum et al., 2008) or clarifying (Slaughter et al., 2007) actions help the child’s developing social understanding.

The results provided clearer support for the third perspective that children’s own use of cognitive terms during conversation with their mother predicted their performance on social understanding, even after controlling for age. While this link may reflect more general language capabilities, like the ability to disentangle sentential complements (e.g., de Villiers, 2005), it may well show that children’s construction of mental state terms serves as a route into grasping the mind in a culture with very little conversation about thoughts and feelings (Carpendale & Lewis, 2004). This resonates the positive correlation of such language during free play with false belief understanding in Western data (Nielsen & Dissanayake, 2000). In many cultural settings, the child’s and mother’s use of mental state terms and the connectedness of mother–child conversation are all significantly correlated (Ensor & Hughes, 2008). This was not the case in this sample and the child’s own contribution appeared to be vital.

The findings presented here need to be corroborated and extended. A next move could be to involve interaction of other adults and siblings. Roger, Rinaldi, and Howe (2012) suggested paternal explanations referring to internal states were crucial in parental reports of children’s social skills. Similarly, sibling and wider kin relationships (Lewis, Freeman, Kyriakidou, Maridaki-Kassotaki, & Berridge, 1996) and peer interactions (Comparini, Douglas, & Perez, 2014) are predictive of social understanding. Plus, it may be that overhearing talk about others’ mental states is important (Gola, 2012). This study could not take these and other factors, like the child’s general language development or executive skills, into account as no standardized tests of these constructs are available. Further research should consider whether other predictors of social understanding, like maternal mind-mindedness (Meins et al., 2002) or the child’s attachment relationships (Laible, 2011), play a part.

Finally, we return to the issue of the apparent delay in these children’s social understanding. In special populations, like autism, a delay in false belief understanding identifies severe social impairment (Rajendran & Mitchell, 2007), yet it is unclear whether the delay in this population simply reflects a cultural difference, which enables us to tease apart influences of different aspects of the child’s language environment. Alternatively, it may represent a severe delay in development that educationalists need to attend to. Training Western mothers to coach preschoolers who are behind their expressive vocabulary leads to gains in the children’s abilities (e.g., Taumoepeau & Reese, 2013), particularly when the child’s earlier mental state understanding is taken into account (Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2016). We must be careful about making generalizations from Western to Eastern cultures concerning parental styles and the child’s development (O’Reilly & Petersen, 2014; Vinden, 2001). Nevertheless, these patterns suggest that social development in Pakistan is seriously behind and further research needs to ascertain whether this influences children’s later social and cognitive milestones.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the children and parents who participated in this research. The authors are also thankful to the administration of Educator and Kohsar Academy, for granting permission to conduct the research in their preschools. In memory of Harry McGurk.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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