Research Findings: The Children's Social Understanding Scale (CSUS) assesses young children's theory of mind (ToM). The current study adapted the parent version of the CSUS-short form to Turkish and examined its utility, for the first time, as an assessment tool for teachers. The associations of parent and teacher reports of the CSUS-short form…

Natural pedagogy emerges early in development, but "good" teaching requires tailoring evidence to learners' knowledge. How does the ability to reason about others' minds support early pedagogical evidence selection abilities? In 3 experiments (N = 205), we investigated preschool-aged children's ability to consider others' knowledge when…

The globalized problems of this socio-scientific issue result from human behaviour; thus educators aim to enhance children's awareness and knowledge of and attitudes and motivations to create an environmentally sustainable society. Previous studies examine preschoolers' ecological attitudes and reasoning regarding gender and urban versus rural…

When we watch movies, we consider the characters' mental states in order to understand and predict the narrative. Recent work in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) uses movie-viewing paradigms to measure functional responses in brain regions recruited for such mental state reasoning (the theory of mind ["ToM"] network). Here,…

The current study examined relations between distinct aspects of moral functioning, and their cognitive and emotional correlates, in preschool age children. Participants were 171 typically developing 3- to 6-year-olds. Each child completed several tasks, including (a) moral tasks assessing both performance of various moral actions and evaluations…

The present study was the first to investigate the ability to selectively trust reliable informants in a sample of Brazilian preschool children from two different socioeconomic backgrounds. Ninety-three 3- and 4-year-old children, equally distributed across a low- and medium-SES group, participated. A standard selective trust task was used.…

Longitudinal tracking of 107 three- to-thirteen-year-olds in a cross-sequential design showed a 6-step theory of mind (ToM) sequence identified by a few past cross-sectional studies validly depicted longitudinal ToM development from early to middle childhood for typically developing (TD) children and those with ToM delays owing to deafness or…

The reliability and validity of the Children's Social Understanding Scale (CSUS) was further assessed by examining fathers' as well as mothers' reports of children's social understanding, along with behavioural measures of children's mental state understanding. 112 families with children aged 38 to 64 months participated with both parents filling…

The development of a mind-reading ability, known as theory-of-mind (ToM), has been recognized as following a universal process, but the age at which the false-belief task is passed has been reported to have wide inter-group variabilities. Japanese children have been reported to acquire a false-belief understanding at a slightly older age than…

Children have repeatedly been shown to selectively prefer to learn from previously accurate informants rather than those who have been inaccurate in the past. However, the stability of individual differences in performance on such tasks has yet to be studied. We presented preschoolers with two identical selective learning tasks conducted one week…

The current study investigates narrative retelling and comprehension among 30 native Arabic-speaking preschool children with a mean age of 5:10. Narrative features of text-complexity (less-complex and more-complex episodic structure) and language variety (Spoken Palestinian Arabic [PA] and Modern Standard Arabic [MSA]) were analyzed for their…

Advanced technology and the shift to a digital childhood have dramatically reshaped children's early life experiences. Children's literacy experiences are also evolving; in addition to printed storybooks, children are now exposed to electronic stories (e-stories). While previous studies have addressed the effects of e-stories on children's…

Many children with hearing loss have atypical social communication skills despite having age-appropriate speech and language. Graduate assessments in an early intervention program for children with hearing loss indicated that despite achieving language skills within typical limits for over a decade, social skills development was frequently…

It has been argued that the distinction between factivity and non-factivity is more fundamental to mental state understanding than that between false beliefs and reality. The present study examined children's growing understanding of all possible contrasts between the factive verb "know" and the non-factive verbs "think" and…

For several decades, there has been an interest in understanding how Emotion Comprehension (EC) and Theory of Mind (ToM) are related during the preschool years. In addition, the links between language and ToM and language and EC have been studied. Although prior work shows the influence of language on ToM and EC, the relationships among these…