Does knowledge of other people's minds grow from concrete experience to abstract concepts? Cognitive scientists have hypothesized that infants' first-person experience, acting on their own goals, leads them to understand others' actions and goals. Indeed, classic developmental research suggests that before infants reach for objects, they do not…

While face masks provide necessary protection against disease spread, they occlude the lower face parts (chin, mouth, nose) and consequently impair the ability to accurately perceive facial emotions. Here we examined how wearing face masks impacted making inferences about emotional states of others (i.e., affective theory of mind; Experiment 1)…

Although much is known about supporting preschoolers' alphabet knowledge, less is known about instructional moves that support preschoolers' narrative comprehension or how preschoolers' developing cognitive skills may support their narrative comprehension development. This school-university partnership project examined relations of preschoolers'…

Understanding nonliteral language requires inferencing ability and is an important but complex aspect of social interaction, involving cognitive (e.g., theory of mind, executive function) as well as language skill, areas in which many deaf individuals struggle. This study examined comprehension of metaphor and sarcasm, assessing the contributions…

Research on Theory of Mind (ToM) and reading comprehension is a lively and active field with numerous publications a year. ToM describes a child's ability to identify and reason about the mental states of others (e.g., think, believe, intend, want). The burgeoning findings from this research suggests ToM plays an important role in the reading…

Interactive read alouds (IRAs) present an opportunity for early elementary educators to support their students' academic skills as well as social development. Conducting IRAs with narrative texts, in particular, showcases how academic and social skills work together to support children's reading comprehension alongside social development. When IRA…

When and how do children develop an understanding of the subjectivity of intentions? Intentions are subjective mental states in many ways. One way concerns their aspectuality: Whether or not a given behavior constitutes an intentional action depends on how, under which aspect, the agent represents it. Oedipus, for example, intended to marry…

If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies, 'I have a cough', the requesting child must make a 'relevance inference' to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive…

Theory of Mind (ToM) is a skill of social cognition recently of interest to literacy researchers. This article presents initial findings from a pilot study investigating the use of ToM to teach theme identification and theme statement formation to beginning readers who are less-skilled in comprehension. The authors designed a brief, 1:1 listening…

Purpose: Reading comprehension is consistently poor in many school-age children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The purpose of this tutorial is to provide an overview from a multicomponent view on the many predictors that may contribute to reading comprehension difficulties in ASD. Method: This tutorial reviews current literature on profiles…

We investigated the contributions of multiple strands of factors--individual characteristics (struggling reader status, working memory, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, knowledge-based inference, theory of mind, comprehension monitoring), a text feature (narrative vs. expository genre), and question types (literal and inferential)--to one's…