The effects of adding metacognitive language to story texts

This study investigated whether exposing Kindergarten children to metacognitive language results in a greater conceptual understanding of mental states, and increased production and comprehension of metacognitive vocabulary. Over a 4-week period, parents, teachers and graduate assistants read about 70 picture books to each participant (N = 48, mean age 4;6). The experimental group received books with text rich in explicit metacognitive terms. The control group received the same books with no metacognitive language but with most stories and accompanying illustrations implicitly requiring children to think about alternative perspectives. Results from pre-test to post-test show firstly, that exposing children to explicit metacognitive vocabulary resulted in significantly more metacognitive verb production in story telling but no improvement in metacognitive language comprehension. This demonstrates Nelson's [Language in Cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1996] notion that children use such vocabulary before fully understanding the concepts. A second finding was that the control group children outperformed the experimental group on a false-belief explanation battery. This suggests that hearing numerous metacognitive terms in stories is less important than having to actively construct one's own mentalistic interpretations from illustrations and text that implicitly draw attention to mental states. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.