Young children's understanding of other people's beliefs and feelings and their connected communication with friends.

Abstract

Links between experimentally assessed social understanding and naturalistically observed verbal communication between friends were investigated in a study of 38 young children. Affective perspective-taking and false-belief tasks were administered to the children at 40 months of age. Connected communication between friends ( average length of connected episodes, average length of play episodes, and average length of pretend episodes) was coded from transcribed audiotaped conversations recorded from a 45-min observation when the children were 47 months of age. Performance on both social understanding tasks was significantly associated with connected communication between friends. Implications for the prognostic utility of social understanding tasks for regulation of real-life interactions are discussed.