PERSUASIVE SKILLS DURING PRE-SCHOOL YEARS: BETWEEN THEORY OF MIND AND PRAGMATICS

Persuasion is the ability to alter a person's beliefs through the use of verbal expressions. Persuasion is not an innate ability, but it begins to develop during pre-school years. As the child develops, he or she learns to use social interactions that become increasingly complex, including the ability to create persuasive arguments in interactions with peers. In recent years, some studies have defined persuasion as part of the pragmatic construct, while others have suggested that it is a sub-domain of the Theory of Mind construct. This study is framed in this debate, trying to understand whether in pre-school age persuasive skills are more related to Theory of Mind or Pragmatics. Fifty children between the ages four and six took part in this cross-sectional study, in which we tested their Theory of Mind skills (through first- and second- order false belief tasks), pragmatic skills (through a modified version of the Physical and Mental Metaphors task), and persuasive skills (through the use of a peer persuasion task). As predicted, the persuasive arguments children produced were significantly associated with false-belief scores, while, contrary to our expectation, a significant relation between persuasion and pragmatics was not observed. The results obtained in our sample suggest that persuasive abilities during the pre-school years are more related to the socio-cognitive domain than the pragmatic domain.