Psychological lexicon as an expression of mental states in primary school children's written narratives

This study aims at examining the use of internal state words in children's written narratives at school age and verifying whether the use of psychological lexicon is affected by school grade and gender. A sample of 314 children, homogeneous in terms of socio-economic status (medium-high), participated in the study. The subjects were almost equally distributed for each of the three primary school classes (3rd, 4th and 5th) and for gender (Boys: 158, Girls: 156). A task, named 'Invent a story', was used to elicit the production of written fictional narratives. The psychological lexicon used in the narratives was coded in terms of the following mental states: Perceptual, Emotional (Positive and Negative), Volitional, Cognitive and Moral. The children's lexical competency was evaluated through a receptive vocabulary test (PPVT-R, Italian version by Stella et al. 2000). The results show that the global production of mental state words in children's fictional narratives remains stable during the three school years in terms of word types of psychological states. A significant increase emerges in the amount of word tokens of psychological states and specifically, between the 4th and 5th class. In addition, a significant gender difference comes out: girls use more internal state words than boys do in the three classes, emotional terms in particular.