Understanding of persuasion in children from 6 to 12 years old.
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Abstract
The present work has as a general objective the study of how children understand the communicative act of persuasion (one in which it is interpreted that a person wants to get something from another) and how this understanding is related to important variables of psychological development. From this general objective two specific objectives are derived. The first consists of analyzing the ability to understand persuasión in primary school children based on making mentalistic inferences about the persuader’s cognitive perspective (their mental state of belief, their motivation/attitude, and their intention trying to persuade), as well as making mentalistic inferences about both the cognitive and emotional perspective of the persuaded person (his mental state of belief and his emotional state, both caused by the words of the persuader). The second specific objective is to examine how these attributions that children make are related to linguistic ability and Theory of mind. For this, 103 children from 6 to 12 years old have been administered an assessment task of the understanding of persuasion, the PPVT-III test to obtain the level of child language development, and a set of assessment tasks of different mentalistic abilities. The results indicate that the child s level of linguistic development is related to the inference of the persuader s intention, as well as to the explicit references to the state of belief and emotion that the persuaded person develops. On the other hand, the results have also shown that the most sophisticated mentalistic inference skills are related to the attribution of the intention to the persuader and to the explicit reference to the emotional state of the persuaded person.
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