Racconto di eventi negativi vissuti dai bambini: lessico psicologico di madri e figli.

The ability to express mental states is an important achievement in children’s development. Inclusion of mental state terms in narratives relating to personal experiences is essential in order to better understand the internal worlds of both self and other persons. The aim of the study was to analyze the spontaneous production of mental states by children aged 5 to 9 years and their mothers when narrating children’s personal events. Narratives concerned physical and psychological negative events. Forty-eight mother-child dyads (mean age : 8 years old) narrated separately three personal events experienced by the children. Narratives were coded according to types of mental state and persons they were attributed to. Introduction of mental states in psychological vs. physical event narratives differed in terms of type of lexicon expressed by both children and mothers, although the latter showed more sophisticated variations depending on event domain. The mothers’ psychological lexicon was richer than that produced by the children and attribution of mental states to mothers was higher in mothers’ rather than in children’s narratives.