Mother–child conversations reflect and support many important skills—including, perhaps, children's understanding of personality. Children acquire an understanding of people's personalities during the preschool and early elementary years. This study of 4- to 9-year-old children and their mothers (N_pairs = 135) investigated the relation between mothers’ ability to reason about the personalities of self and others—termed personal intelligence—and characteristics of their conversations with their children. Mothers and children conversed about topics potentially involving personality (e.g., contrasting two relatives), and later completed a validated ability-based measure of personal intelligence. Across the conversations recorded between mother and child dyads, mothers’ personality talk was correlated with children's, and mothers’ personal intelligence scores predicted both, independent of age. This is the first study to document individual differences among mothers that may shape their conversations with children about people, with implications for children's developing understanding of personality.

中文翻译：

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“你怎么形容爷爷？” 母亲的个人智力预测与孩子的性格谈话

母子对话反映并支持许多重要的技能——也许包括孩子对个性的理解。孩子们在学龄前和小学早期就了解人的性格。本研究对 4 至 9 岁儿童及其母亲（N_对 = 135）调查了母亲对自我和他人个性进行推理的能力（称为个人智力）与她们与孩子谈话的特征之间的关系。母亲和孩子们就可能涉及个性的话题进行了交谈（例如，对比两个亲戚），然后完成了一项经过验证的基于能力的个人智力测量。在母子二人之间记录的对话中，母亲的性格谈话与孩子的性格相关，而母亲的个人智力得分预测了两者，与年龄无关。这是第一项记录母亲个体差异的研究，这些差异可能会影响她们与孩子谈论人的对话，并影响孩子对人格的理解。