СOGNITIVE INTERPRETATION OF THE CONCEPT OF MOTHER IN ENGLISH
Keywords:
Keywords: psychological lexicon, shared reading, semantic development, children's temperament, mother's empathy Mother-child talk about inner states and the development of theory of mindAbstract
Annotation. In this study, we investigated the relationship between mothers'
psychological lexicon and children's cognitive and socio-emotive development as
assessed through conceptual and semantic understanding tasks, in addition to the
traditional tasks of theory of mind. Currently, there is considerable evidence to suggest
that the frequency of mothers' mental state words used in mother-child picture-book
reading is linked with children's theory of mind skills. Furthermore, mothers' use of
cognitive terms is more strongly related to children's theory of mind performances than
the mothers' references to other mental states, such as desires or emotions. Current
literature has established that early maternal input is related to later child mental state
understanding; however it has not yet clarified which maternal terms are most useful
for the socio-emotional and cognitive development of the child, and which aspect of
the cognitive development benefits from the mother-child interaction.
