Mental state talk in children's face-to-face and telephone narratives

•Mental state talk in the face-to-face and telephone conditions are correlated.•Telephone elicited more psychological terms than face-to-face did.•Telephone narratives included more willingness, cognitive and moral terms.•Age moderated the effect of condition on mental state talk.

This study analyzes children's theory of mind through mental state talk in two conditions differing for the physical presence/absence of an interlocutor and a shared context. The participants in this study were 115 five- to seven-year-old Italian children. We elicited children's mental state talk through a narrative task. Each child participated under two conditions, face-to-face and telephone story-telling. We coded transcripts to isolate terms referring to mental states. The two total scores, one for mental state talk in the face-to-face conditions and another for the over the phone conditions, correlated. Students used more mental state terms in the telephone conditions than they did in the face-to-face conditions. Children showed more willingness and used more cognitive and moral terms in the telephone conditions than they did in the face-face conditions, with age playing a moderating role. This study confirms the recontextualizing effect of the telephone in eliciting children's mental state talk.