1998 Volume 12 Issue 2 Pages 77-87
This study cleared the characteristics of talk about internal states in mother-child and father-child interaction in the same setting. Twenty-one 2-and 3-year olds were observed with their mothers and their fathers in clay modeling situation at home. The results showed that parents and children mentioned desires more flequently than other internal state terms in the clay modeling, but there were no significant differences according to parental sex. In addition, relational patterns of reference to internal states were similar between mother-child and father-child dyads. It may be possible that the fathers, same as the mothers, play an important role in the development of children's understanding of the internanal states.
