Mental state language and quality of conversational experience in deaf and hearing children

Deaf children of hearing parents show a protracted delay in perfor-mance on ‘theory of mind’ measures that suggests they encounterdifficulties in acquiring knowledge of false beliefs and other mentalstates. Considerable evidence indicates that children’s early experi-ence of adults’ mental state talk predicts their later social-cognitivedevelopment. However, no previous study has analyzed very youngdeaf children’s access to conversation about mental states. We com-pared the conversational turn-taking and input of hearing parentsto deaf and hearing children aged 17–35 months in the UK andSweden. Mothers of hearing children used far more cognitive men-tal state language with their infants and their conversations werecharacterized by more communicatively effective turn-taking thanmothers of deaf children. Across two different cultures, these find-ings indicate that conversations differ significantly in these aspectsof interaction thought to be crucial for later social-cognitive devel-opment.