Preregistration for parental use of mental state terms with pre-school children in Singapore

Preregistration documents. This study will investigate parental use of mental state descriptions in Singaporean parents' speech to preschoolers - with a focus on describing internal mental states such as 'knowing' 'wanting' and 'thinking'. Past studies on child directed descriptions of mental state terms have been mostly conducted in Western populations where Standard English is the norm. This study will investigate parental use of mental state descriptions in the highly multilingual context of Singapore, for parents narrating a wordless picture book 'What a Scary Storm' (Styles, 2020). The book was designed to elicit descriptions of mental states such as 'looking for' 'finding' and 'wanting', and through a narrative that includes a violation of expectation for the main character. This preregistration describes planned descriptive and hypothesis-testing analyses. V1.1 unrestricts the previously embargoed documents